java.io.File and File Input

Section 4.6 describes and illustrates how to get the values of method arguments from a file.

1. From the Java Library: java.io.File and File Input

In addition to command-line and GUI user interfaces, there is one more standard user interface, files. In this section we show how the Scanner class, that was used in Chapter 2 for keyboard input, can also read input from files. Reading input from a file is relevant to only certain types of programming problems. It is hard to imagine how a file would be used in playing the One Row Nim game but a file might very well be useful to store a collection of riddles that could be read and displayed by a Java program. We will develop such a program later in this section.

Java has two types of files, text files and binary files. A text file stores a sequence of characters and is the type of file created by standard text editors like NotePad and WordPad on a Windows computer or SimpleText on a Macintosh. A binary file has a more general format that can store numbers and other data the way they are stored in the computer. In this section we will consider only text files. 

Source: R. Morelli and R. Walde, Trinity College
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