How to take Character Input in Java using BufferedReader Class

In Java, the Scanner class is used to take character input from the user. The Scanner class is not a single solution of taking character input from the user. The BufferedReader class an alternative to the Scanner class for taking character input from the user. Let's start understanding how to take character input in Java using BufferedReader.

These are the following steps to take character input using BufferedReader:

How to take Character Input in Java using BufferedReader Class

In the first step, we have to create an instance of the BufferedReader class by using the InputStreamReader The InputStreamReader is a class that act as a bridge in between the byte stream to character stream. The reason of using InputStreamReaderis to decode bytes to characters.
We will use the read() method of the BufferedReader class to read character from the given BufferedReader and typecast it to char.
We will store the return value of the read() method into the character type variable. The read() method returns the character read by this method. The read() method gives us result -1 in case when the buffered stream has ended and there is no character to be read.
At the end, we will print the character data on the screen which we read using the read() method.

Let's take some example to understand how the BufferedReader class is used to read character data in Java.

We will take two examples, i.e., BufferedReaderExample and BufferedReaderExample2. In the first example, we will simply read the character data using the BufferedReader class and print it to the screen. In the second example, we will get the string from user using BufferedReader class and perform some operations on the user entered string.

BufferedReaderExample.java

//Import classes and packages
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;

//Creating BufferedReaderExample class
public class BufferedReaderExample {
	//main() method with IOException
	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException{
		//Creating instance of the BufferedReader class with InputStreamReader
		BufferedReader obj = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
        //Reading character data
		char data = (char)obj.read();
		//Printing the data on the screen
        System.out.println(data);

	}
}

Output

BufferedReader class can also be used to get the string from the user. For this, we will use the readLine() of the BufferedReader class. Let's understand it by taking another example of BufferedReader. We will calculate the area of the triangle by taking its base value and height value from the user as a string using BufferedReader class. We then convert the string data into a double by parsing string data, and then we calculate the area of the triangle by using the formula (base*height)/2.

BufferedReaderExample2.java

//Import classes and packages
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;

//Creating BufferedReaderExample2 class
public class BufferedReaderExample2 {
	//main() method with IOException
	public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException{
		//Creating instance of the BufferedReader class with InputStreamReader
		BufferedReader obj = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));
        
		System.out.print ( "Enter the height of triangle:" );
		//Getting height of triangle
		String hightData = obj.readLine();
		double height = Double.parseDouble ( hightData );
		
		System.out.print ( "Enter the base of triangle:" );
		//Getting base of triangle
		String baseData = obj.readLine();
		double base = Double.parseDouble ( baseData );
		
		//Calculating area of triangle
		double area = (height*base)/2;
		
		//Printing the area of the triangle
        System.out.println("The area of triangle is:"+area );

	}
}

Output