Question

It seems there are different ways to read and write data of files in Java.

I want to read ASCII data from a file. What are the possible ways and their differences?

Answer 1

ASCII is a TEXT file so you would use Readers for reading. Java also supports reading from a binary file using InputStreams. If the files being read are huge then you would want to use a BufferedReader on top of a FileReader to improve read performance.

Go through this article on how to use a Reader

I’d also recommend you download and read this wonderful (yet free) book called Thinking In Java

In Java 7:

new String(Files.readAllBytes(...))

(docs)
or

Files.readAllLines(...)

(docs)

In Java 8:

Files.lines(..).forEach(...)

(docs)