In.java lets us read information stored in different files. As long as we know the format of a file, we can parse its contents and programmatically interact with it. The first example we will see of In.java is with hw02, NBody, where you will simulate a universe based upon information stored in a separate file containing the radius, positions, velocities, and image files of each of the bodies in the solar system. Crucially, you do not need to know any other information other than the format of this file in order to simulate infinitely many solar systems with your program.
To use In.java, save In.java to the same folder as your program. Once you add it to your folder, you should open it up and compile it.
The standard library provides the class In.java to support accessing information from a file. Study StudentsFileProcessor.java, which is contained in the nbody_data.zip you downloaded in Part 0. This file provides an example of reading information from a file. Compile StudentsFileProcessor.java, and run it from the Codio Terminal with the argument students.txt:
java StudentsFileProcessor students.txt
In your program, declare and initialize a variable, inStream, as below:
In inStream = new In(filename); // creates a variable inStream of type In to read from the file
inStream is just a variable name. You could name this variable anything, but for convenience we are giving you the name “inStream” for your file reader variable.
Now that inStream is initialized, you can access/read information from it using the following function calls. These functions behave identically to those in StdIn. Below, you will see that each value read from the file (accessed via inStream) is immediately stored in a variable (i.e. b, i, d, s).
boolean b = inStream.isEmpty(); // boolean value that is true if there are no more values, false otherwise
int i = inStream.readInt(); // reads in an int from inStream
double d = inStream.readDouble(); // reads in a double from inStream
boolean b = inStream.readBoolean(); // reads in a boolean from inStream
String s = inStream.readString(); // reads in a string from inStream
String s = inStream.readLine(); // reads in an entire line from inStream
String s = inStream.readAll(); // reads in the entire file from inStream
inStream will start reading from the beginning of the file (top left). Each time a function like readDouble() is called, inStream attempts to read the next (unread) number as a double (an error will occur if it cannot be parsed to a double). The next time a read function is called, inStream moves to the next item in the file.
For example, say that a file, sample.txt, is as follows:
4 5
The code snippet
In inStream = new In("sample.txt");
int x = inStream.readInt();
double y = inStream.readDouble();
will set variable x to 4 and variable y to 5.0.