Search code examples
javastringeol

why the snippet is unable to detect the end of line

FileReader reader = new FileReader("d:\\UnderTest\\AVS\\tester.txt");
       char ch; 
       int x;
       while( ( x = reader.read() ) != -1 ) {
              // I use the following statement to detect EOL
              if( Character.toString((char)x) == System.getProperty("line.separator") ) {
                  System.out.println("new line encountered !");
              } System.out.print( (char)x );
       }

In this code the if statement never works though in tester.txt there are 2 sentences written on new lines. Why is that so ?

Solution

  • As some have mentioned, the system property line.separator may return more than one character, e.g. on Windows, where it's \r\n.

    Depending on your use case, you might be better off using BufferedReader::readLine() to directly read an entire line and avoid having to perform a manual comparison.