Reading in a file with Perl and Java

This is why people love Perl. A small amount of work to do a BIG TASK:

        $file_name = "somefile.txt";
        open (my $fh, $file_name) or die "Ouch: $!\n";
        # $text variable now contains whatever the file contains
        $text = do {
            local $/ = undef;
            <$fh>;
        };
        close($fh) or die("Ugh: $!\n");

Just to compare, this is how you would do in Java:

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;

public class ReadFile {
    public static void main (String[] args) {
        try {
            String filename = "somefile.txt";
            BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filename));
            ArrayList lines = new ArrayList();
            String line = null;
            while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {
                lines.add(line);
            }
            bufferedReader.close();
        }
        catch (IOException e) {
              System.err.println("OUCH!!!!");
        }
    }
}

After this, you get a list of string that contains contents of a file. This is a little extreme case, but still… it shows how much of work you would do if you want to do the same job in Java.