I’d also experimented with \Z (end of input apart from final terminator, if any), just to see if that was any different (it isn’t). But I’d not seen the \A idea before… interesting, if somewhat unintuitive!

So just out of interest I set up a quick experiment to try \A, and it does seem to work correctly even with a SequenceInputStream (tried this on Oracle JDK 5, 6 and 7).

However, a quick run of some other tests seems to show that using \A throws a “NoSuchElementException” (with no message or cause) if an IOException occurs at the start of the input or when trying to close the input. This contrasts with the more usual behavior of storing the IOException for subsequent checking/retrieval and treating the input as terminated (but without then treating that as a separate and immediate “not found” exception).

So a single \A does seem to work, at least on the particular thing I’ve seen a single \z fail on, but it may need somewhat different error handling and may result in less clear exception messages in some situations.

Anyway, after seeing what happens with \z, I still don’t think I’d entirely trust a single \A read either!

String text = new Scanner( source ).useDelimiter(“\\A”).next();

[1] http://weblogs.java.net/blog/pat/archive/2004/10/stupid_scanner.html