Getting separate characters from a java Scanner

Question

In Java's Scanner class, why does the syntax nextChar() not exist, and is there a command would do something similar with out using the String variable?

Answer 1

Two solutions:

• use toCharArray(): this will return a char[] over which you can use a foreach loop;
• use the string length in combination with .charAt().

Answer 2

Java's Scanner class operates on tokens, complete units of output. This is usually complete words, lines of text, numbers (integers, doubles, floats, etc). If you want to read individual characters, you should use BufferedReader in a construct like this

BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));

Replacing System.in with whatever input you're using for Scanner. Then use char c = (char)in.read() to read the next character from the input.