Read from a file using a BufferedReader


For reading text from a file it's better to use a Reader class instead of a InputStream class since Reader classes have the purpose of reading textual input.
In this example we use the BufferedReader class to read text from a file line by line using it's readLine method.
It is possible to read the data the same way as with the BufferedInputStream using either a byte array or read one byte at a time, but if you're going to read plain text this is easier and produce more readable code.

In the example we simply create a BufferedReader object and start reading from the file line by line until the readLine method returns null, which indicates the end of the file.


import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;

/**
 *
 * @author javadb.com
 */
public class Main {
    
    /**
     * Reads text from a file line by line
     */
    public void readFromFile(String filename) {
        
        BufferedReader bufferedReader = null;
        
        try {
            
            //Construct the BufferedReader object
            bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filename));
            
            String line = null;
            
            while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {
                //Process the data, here we just print it out
                System.out.println(line);
            }
            
        } catch (FileNotFoundException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        } finally {
            //Close the BufferedReader
            try {
                if (bufferedReader != null)
                    bufferedReader.close();
            } catch (IOException ex) {
                ex.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
    }
    
    /**
     * @param args the command line arguments
     */
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new Main().readFromFile("myFile.txt");
    }
}

See this example if you want to compare with reading from a BufferedInputStream:

Read from file with BufferedInputStream
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