Curly quotes causing Java Scanner hasNextLine() to be false — why?

Question

I\'ve been having an issue getting the java.util.Scanner to read a text file I saved in Notepad, even though it works fine with others. Basically, when it tries to read the

Answer 1

Scanner's hasNextLine method will just return false if it encountered encoding error in the input file. Without any exception. This is frustrating, and it is not documented anywhere, even in JDK 8 documentation.

If you just want to read a file line-by-line, use this instead:

final BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("inputfile.txt"), "inputencoding"));

while (true) {
    String line = input.readLine();
    if (line == null) break;
    // process line
}

input.close();

Make sure the inputencoding above is replaced with the correct encoding of the file. Most likely it is utf-8 or ascii. Even if the encoding mismatches, it won't prematurely terminate like Scanner.