Thread: delimiter question

I have a file that contains

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

I have a scanner that reads it, puts it into a String, and then attempts to use the split method to tokenize it. The problem is that it isn't counting \n as a delimiter.

try {
            Scanner scan = new Scanner(theFile);
            while(scan.hasNextLine()) {
                n++;
                stringForm += scan.nextLine();
            }   //end while
 
            //make array
            square = new int[n][n];
            //put ints into array
            String[] tokens = stringForm.split("\\s");
            for(int i=0;i<tokens.length;i++) {  //loop through array
                    for(int rowN=0;rowN<n;rowN++) {
                        for(int colN=0;colN<n;colN++) {
                            System.out.println(tokens[i]);
                            square[rowN][colN] = Integer.parseInt(tokens[i]);   //initialize array

That is the relevant code. I was under the impression \\s would cover all whitespace which includes \n. Can anyone help me?

This is because you are using nextLine(). Here's a quote from the API

Originally Posted by Java API

This method returns the rest of the current line, excluding any line separator at the end.

As you can see, nextLine() doesn't return a linefeed. So you cannot parse it if it isn't there.

Regards,
Chris