Reading from a text file and storing in a String [

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• How do I create a Java string from the contents of a file? 34 answers

How can we read data from a text file and store in a String variable?

is it possible to pass the filename in a method and it would return the String which is the text from the file.

What kind of utilities do I have to import? A list of statements will be great.

Answer 1

These are the necersary imports:

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

And this is a method that will allow you to read from a File by passing it the filename as a parameter like this: readFile("yourFile.txt");

String readFile(String fileName) throws IOException {
    BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));
    try {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        String line = br.readLine();

        while (line != null) {
            sb.append(line);
            sb.append("\n");
            line = br.readLine();
        }
        return sb.toString();
    } finally {
        br.close();
    }
}

Answer 2

How can we read data from a text file and store in a String Variable?

Err, read data from the file and store it in a String variable. It's just code. Not a real question so far.

Is it possible to pass the filename in a method and it would return the String which is the text from the file.

Yes it's possible. It's also a very bad idea. You should deal with the file a part at a time, for example a line at a time. Reading the entire file into memory before you process any of it adds latency; wastes memory; and assumes that the entire file will fit into memory. One day it won't. You don't want to do it this way.