Java reading a file into an ArrayList?

Question

How do you read the contents of a file into an ArrayList in Java?

Here are the file contents:

cat
ho         


        

Answer 1

Here's a solution that has worked pretty well for me:

List lines = Arrays.asList(
    new Scanner(new File(file)).useDelimiter("\\Z").next().split("\\r?\\n")
);

If you don't want empty lines, you can also do:

List lines = Arrays.asList(
    new Scanner(new File(file)).useDelimiter("\\Z").next().split("[\\r\\n]+")
);