Normally, a scanner is the first part of a compiling system. It is meant to be used to parse a document into tokens that a compiler might interpret. I have found this class to be very useful on occasions. You probably didn't play with the match method which allows you to apply regular expressions to the current line. That is its most valuable function I think. If you are only parsing the beginning of a line then the nextLine is an easy way skip past the remaining line.