Question

        while( inStream.hasNextLine() )
        {
                ...

                lineList.add( inStream.nextLine() );
        }
        ...

lineList is an ArrayList. The code is reading everything nicely except it won’t grab the last line. The last two lines in the text file end like this:

"a sentence here..."
<a blank line here. the blank line is the last line>

I’m assuming it won’t grab it since hasNextLine() is not detecting another line after this one?

What’s a way to grab the last line? I thought reading until it was EOF and then catching the exception might work but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that.

EDIT: MORE INFO

public void readLines()
{
    lineList = new ArrayList();

    try
    {
        inStream = new Scanner( new File( fileName ) );
    }
    catch( FileNotFoundException e )
    {
        System.out.println( "Error opening the file. Try again." );
    }


    if ( inStream != null )
    {
        while( inStream.hasNextLine() )
        {
            ++originalLines;

            lineList.add( inStream.nextLine() );
        }
        inStream.close();
    }
}

There’s the whole method. Anything wrong?

EDIT: EVEN MORE INFO

public static void main(String[] args)
{
    Scanner inStream = null;
    String test = "";

    inStream = new Scanner( test );

    while( inStream.hasNextLine() )
    {
        System.out.println( inStream.nextLine() );
    }
}

It will not pick up an empty string but it will pick up a whitespace ” “

Answer 1

nextLine() works just fine to return the last line, even if it’s blank. I suspect your problem lies elsewhere.

String multilinetext =
    "Line1\n" +
    "Line2\n" +
    "\n" +
    "Line4\n" +
    "\n";
Scanner sc = new Scanner(multilinetext);
while (sc.hasNextLine()) {
    System.out.println("[" + sc.nextLine() + "]");
}
/* prints 
[Line1]
[Line2]
[]
[Line4]
[]
*/

---

It will not pick up an empty string

This is the correct behavior by design. If the input is an empty string, you can’t expect a Scanner to say hasNextLine() and return an empty string on nextLine(), especially since this doesn’t advance the Scanner past any character.

If you think about it, if you expect a Scanner to say hasNextLine() on an empty string, and return an empty string on nextLine(), then this would result in an infinite loop: it will always hasNextLine() and it will always return an empty string on nextLine() forever. Such behavior is clearly impractical.