Question about loadstrings() function

Processing Coding Questions
1

Hi!

Is it expected behaviour for the ‘loadstrings()’ function to skip blank or empty lines in Processing 3? The documentation doesn’t mention this, but that seems to be the case. I’m loading a small text file which has some empty lines (not even spaces), and it seems to be skipping them.

https://processing.org/reference/loadStrings_.html

Thanks.

1 Like
2

Good question. I believe this might be expected behavior. After some digging, it looks like loadStrings() utilizes a BufferedReader:

Inside, we can see readline() being called, and according to the docs:

Returns:
A String containing the contents of the line, not including any line-termination characters, or null if the end of the stream has been reached

In short, it’s tossing the empty lines.

1 Like
3

It is tossing the line terminators, but it is still indexing the lines in the array – it doesn’t “skip” them or “toss” them completely.

Given a five line text file, foo.txt:

foo

bar

baz

This code:

String[] strs = loadStrings("foo.txt");
for(int i=0; i<strs.length; i++){
  println(i, strs[i]);
}

outputs:

0 foo
1
2 bar
3
4 baz

2 Likes
4

Thanks. I should have done more investigation before posting. I found the problem, it has nothing to do with the loadStrings() function, but with another function that was using the array of strings. Seems it skips empty lines.

2 Likes
5

Glad you worked it out!

Continues: Question about GTextArea.setText() in G4P