How to print out first few lines of a file?

[drew taylor]

Please can someone help me with the following? I have tried looking on the net for an example progeam or a tutorial but I didn't find anything.

How can I make it so that my program prints out a specifed number of lines from a file (i.e a text file, html document)

Any hints, example code will be appresiated!

[fred rosenberger]

start by writing a program that opens a file. Get that to work.

Then, add code to close the file (just to be nice).

Then see if you can read a line. once that works, try to print the line.

etc.

start small, make sure it works at each step before tackling the next.

[drew taylor]

I think I got it to work. I'm trying to modify an existing example class that gets the html information about a specified website. I did the following:

Instead of having:

while (in.hasNextLine()) {
System.out.println(" " + in.nextLine());
}

I modified it to:

Scanner in = new Scanner(u.getInputStream());

int i = 6;

while (i > 0) {
System.out.println(" " + in.nextLine());
i = i -1;
}

[Paul Clapham]

That will work for many files. But there are some files where a problem will arise. Can you see what might cause that problem?

[fred rosenberger]

As a general tip, if you know in advance how many times you want to do something, a for() loop is the preferred solution. there's no reason for it to my knowledge - it's just the idiom that's used.

but even if you did

for (int x=0;x<6;x++) 
{
  //blah blah blah
}

you still might have a problem with small files...