I know I should know how to read a file with Java, but old dogs die hard, or something. At any rate, I found a great example that even works. I got the code from here:

Read from a file using a BufferedReader – A Java Code Example.

And here’s what I came up with:

public static String readFileToString(String fileName) {

        BufferedReader bufferedReader = null;
		StringBuffer output = new StringBuffer();
        try {
            bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));

            String line = null;
			String delim = "";
            while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {
	            output.append(delim);
	            output.append(line);
	            delim = "\n";
            }

        } catch (FileNotFoundException ex) {
	        log.error(ex);
        } catch (IOException ex) {
	        log.error(ex);
        } finally {

            //Close the BufferedReader
            try {
                if (bufferedReader != null) {
	                bufferedReader.close();
                }
            } catch (IOException ex) {
                log.error(ex);
            }
        }
		return output.toString();
	}

Update: After thinking about this a little more I decided to use the Apache Commons FileUtils class to do the work for me. It simplifies things a little.

	public static String readFileToString(File pInputFile) {
		try {
			return FileUtils.readFileToString(pInputFile, "ISO-8859-1");
		} catch (IOException e) {
			log.error(e);
		}
	}

My question to my readers is, how is the best way to write test case for file reading? Any takers?

(image by As Good)