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

1. BufferedReader will probably give you better performance (because Scanner is based on InputStreamReader, look sources). ups, for reading from files it uses nio. When I tested nio performance against BufferedReader performance for big files nio shows a bit better performance.
2. For reading from file try Apache Commons IO.