Parsing a fixed-width formatted file in Java

Question

I've got a file from a vendor that has 115 fixed-width fields per line. How can I parse that file into the 115 fields so I can use them in my code?

My first thought is just to make constants for each field like NAME_START_POSITION and NAME_LENGTH and using substring. That just seems ugly, so I'm curious about better ways of doing this. None of the couple of libraries a Google search turned up seemed any better, either.

Answer 1

I would use a flat file parser like flatworm instead of reinventing the wheel: it has a clean API, is simple to use, has decent error handling and a simple file format descriptor. Another option is jFFP but I prefer the first one.