2 Ways to Read a Text File in Java 6

You can read a text file in Java 6 by using BufferedReader or Scanner class. Both classes provide convenient methods to read a text file line by line e.g. Scanner provides nextLine() method and BufferedReader provides readLine() method. If you are reading a binary file, you can use use FileInputStream. By the way, when you are reading text data, you also need to provide character encoding, if you don't then platform's default character encoding is used. In Java IO, streams like InputStream are used to read bytes and Readers like FileReader are used to read character data. BufferedReader is the traditional way to read data because it reads file buffer by buffer instead of character by character, so it's more efficient if you are reading large files. BufferedReader is also there from JDK 1 itself while Scanner was added to Java 5.

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