How do I read a text file using BufferedReader?

The code snippet below is an example of how to read a text file using BufferedReader class from the java.io package. This snippet read a text file called README.md and print out its content.

To create an instance of java.io.BufferedReader we do the following steps:

File file = new File("README.md");
FileReader fileReader = new FileReader(file));
BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(fileReader);

Let’s see the complete code snippet.

package org.kodejava.io;

import java.io.*;

public class ReadTextFileExample {
    private static final String LINE_SEPARATOR = System.getProperty("line.separator");

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        File file = new File("README.md");
        try (BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file))) {
            StringBuilder contents = new StringBuilder();
            String text;
            while ((text = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                contents.append(text).append(LINE_SEPARATOR);
            }

            System.out.println(contents.toString());
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

You can also try to use the following example to read a file, How do I read text file content line by line using commons-io?. To create and write a text file see the following example: How do I create and write data into text file?.