Re: canonical text files

From:
Lew <noone@lewscanon.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.help
Date:
Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:11:28 -0500
Message-ID:
<4B55BD90.5030606@lewscanon.com>
Roedy Green wrote:

Should it have a final CrLf or not?


John B. Matthews wrote:

"Some programs have problems processing the last line of a file if it is
not newline terminated. Conversely, programs that expect newline to be
used as a separator will interpret a final newline as starting a new
(empty) line."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline>


In other words, the answer depends on the intended use for the text file.
It's not a Java issue.

Roedy Green wrote:

Java seems conflicted on the issue.
Originally readLn did not work unless there was a final "separator".


What is this 'readLn' of which you speak?

'BufferedReader#readLine()' Javadocs imply that the newline is a line
terminator, but it's unclear whether it'll return a last line that lacks the
terminator. Other 'Reader's (that aren't subtypes of 'BufferedReader') don't
have a similar method, so I don't know how you call Java "conflicted" over
this. In order for there to be a conflict, there needs to be more than one
way it works and they have to somehow interfere with each other. That's not
happening here, and that's leaving aside that how a particular class chooses
to handle such input imposes no requirement that any other class do it the
same way.

--
Lew

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