Question

I wrote the following code to read two different text files. One text file is called the “username” text file, while the other is called the “password” text file. I am creating a login program. In order for the user to login successfully, the line number of the username must match that of the password. For some reason however, my LineNumberReader for both files is stuck at zero, which is strange because I put assertions to avoid this and the assertions did not throw an error. I know they are zero because I printed out each reader. It also keeps printing out “Match found” even when I deliberately put in a wrong username-password match. Can anyone figure this out?

    public boolean usernamePasswordCheck(String username, String password) throws         FileNotFoundException, IOException{
    BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("src/BioStat/username.txt"));
    BufferedReader br2 = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("src/BioStat/password.txt"));
    String line;
    String line2;
    int userLine=0;
    int passwordLine=0;
    LineNumberReader lnr = new LineNumberReader(new FileReader("src/BioStat/username.txt"));
    LineNumberReader lnr2 = new LineNumberReader(new FileReader("src/BioStat/password.txt"));
    while((line=br.readLine())!=null){
        if(line.equals(username)){
            //username is found in username list. There is a match!
            //let's get it's line number
            userLine = lnr.getLineNumber();
        }else{
            //username was not found in list, so we should keep reading.
            line = br.readLine();
        }
    }
    System.out.println("Userline: "+userLine);
    br.close();
    while((line2 = br2.readLine())!=null){
        if(line2.equals(password)){
            //username is found in username list. There is a match!
            //let's get it's line number
            passwordLine = lnr2.getLineNumber();

        }else{
            //username was not found in list, so we should keep reading.
            line2 = br2.readLine();
        }
    }
    System.out.println("passwordLine: "+passwordLine);
    br2.close();
    assert(userLine!=0);
    assert(passwordLine!=0);
    if(userLine==passwordLine){
        System.out.println("Match Found");
        matchfound = true;
    }else{
        System.out.println("Username and Password don't match");
    }
    return matchfound;
}

Answer 1

You aren’t advancing your LineNumberReader every loop. The while loop is taking care of advancing your BufferedReader.

You can actually simplify things and just use the LineNumberReader without the BufferedReaders because their readLine will give you the text just as a BufferedReader will. For example:

String line = null;
int userLine=0;
LineNumberReader lnr = new LineNumberReader(new FileReader("src/BioStat/username.txt"));
while((line=lnr.readLine())!=null){
    if(line.equals(username)){
        //username is found in username list. There is a match!
        //let's get it's line number
        userLine = lnr.getLineNumber();
        break;
    }
}
lnr.close();

The call to readLine on the LineNumberReader advances to the next line (and thus will increase the line number as well).