Writing a "\t" to a text file creates a line?

Question

I'm writing to 2 textfiles and I wanted a eaiser way to read the textfiles without all the words and number laying to close to eachother so I chose to write them with a tab to seperate them. But when I do this my class LineNumberReader seems to think that the tab is a new line.

I have 2 classes. TextWriting and compareTextFiles

When I run my TextWriting class I can get an output that is like this:

(1)       word1
(2)       word2
(3)       word3

So it is working as intended. (I used spaces for formatting purposes, but the file contains the tabs correctly)

And in my other class compareTextFilesI compare 2 textfiles that I wrote from the first class. The important code is this.

String word,word2;
int i;
lnr = new LineNumberReader(new FileReader(file));
while (sc.hasNext() && sc2.hasNext()) {                
    word = sc.next();
    word2 = sc2.next();                
    lnr.readLine();
    if (word.equalsIgnoreCase(word2)) {
        i = lnr.getLineNumber();
        System.out.println("Line number: " + i + " and the word: [" + word + "]" + " and the word " + "[" + word2 + "]" + " is the same!");                    
    }
    else
        System.out.println("[" + word + "]" + " and " + "[" + word2 + "]" + " is not the same");
}

The output I am recieving is:

Line number: 1 and the word: [(1)] and the word [(1)] is the same!
Line number: 2 and the word: [asd] and the word [asd] is the same!
Line number: 3 and the word: [(2)] and the word [(2)] is the same!
Line number: 3 and the word: [yeye] and the word [yeye] is the same!
Line number: 3 and the word: [(3)] and the word [(3)] is the same!
Line number: 3 and the word: [he] and the word [he] is the same!

Why does it get stuck on 3 so many times, and does tab create a new line of some sort?

Answer 1

Your code calls LineNumberReader.readLine for every scanner token. Presuming a) each Scanner uses the default delimiter (in which case each line has 2 tokens) b) LineNumberReader.readLine increments the value returned by LineNumberReader.getLineNumber until the the file has been fully read - then for each token (rather than each line) it will increment until the 3 lines are read (and then stop incrementing), resulting in the output you get.

An alternative suggestion (there are many ways to skin this cat): consider using only the 2 Scanner's to read the files, reading the files using the Scanner.readLine method. For each line, increment a variable representing the line number and then parse the lines as needed.

int lineCount = 0;
while ( sc.hasNextLine() && sc2.hasNextLine() ){
    lineCount++;
    String line1 = sc.nextLine();
    String line2 = sc2.nextLine();
    //parse the lines
    String[] line1tabs = line1.split("\t");
    //etc...
}