Scanner vs. BufferedReader

Question

As far I know, the two most common methods of reading character-based data from a file in Java is using Scanner or BufferedReader. I also know that

Answer 1

In currently latest JDK6 release/build (b27), the Scanner has a smaller buffer (1024 chars) as opposed to the BufferedReader (8192 chars), but it's more than sufficient.

As to the choice, use the Scanner if you want to parse the file, use the BufferedReader if you want to read the file line by line. Also see the introductory text of their aforelinked API documentations.

• Parsing = interpreting the given input as tokens (parts). It's able to give back you specific parts directly as int, string, decimal, etc. See also all those nextXxx() methods in Scanner class.
• Reading = dumb streaming. It keeps giving back you all characters, which you in turn have to manually inspect if you'd like to match or compose something useful. But if you don't need to do that anyway, then reading is sufficient.