Question

I’m reading from a file that reads something like all on one line:

Hello World!\nI've been trying to get this to work for a while now.\nFrustrating.\n

And my Scanner reads that from the file and puts it in a String:

Scanner input = new Scanner(new File(fileName));
String str = input.nextLine();
System.out.print(str);

Now, I want the output then to be:

Hello World!
I've been trying to get this work for a while now.
Frustrating.

But instead I’m getting the exact same thing as the input. That is, each \n is included in the output and everything is on one line instead of separate lines.

I thought that Scanner would be able to read the escape character properly but it’s instead copying it onto the String like it’s \\n.

Answer 1

If \n is written is the file you can’t use nextLine() because there is not \n (end of line) but instead there is \\n (two characters).

Instead try with a delimiter :

    Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File("/home/alain/Bureau/ttt.txt"));
    sc.useDelimiter("\\\\n");
    while(sc.hasNext()){
        System.out.println(sc.next());
    }

Output :

Hello World!

I’ve been trying to get this to work for a while now.

Frustrating.

EDIT:

If you want to read the file and replace the \n in the text with actual EOL. You can simply use :

Scanner sc = new Scanner(new File("/home/alain/Bureau/ttt.txt"));

//loop over real EOL
while(sc.hasNextLine()){

     //Replace the `\n` in the line with real EOL.
     System.out.println(sc.nextLine().replace("\\n", System.getProperty("line.separator")));
}