Scala Cookbook

14.12. Prompting for Input from a Scala Shell Script

Problem

You want to prompt a user for input from a Scala shell script and read her responses.

Solution

Use the readLine, print, printf, and Console.read* methods to read user input, as demonstrated in the following script. Comments in the script describe each method:

#!/bin/sh
exec scala "$0" "$@"
!#

// write some text out to the user with Console.println
Console.println("Hello")

// Console is imported by default, so it's not really needed, just use println
println("World")

// readLine lets you prompt the user and read their input as a String
val name = readLine("What's your name? ")

// readInt lets you read an Int, but you have to prompt the user manually
print("How old are you? ")
val age = readInt()

// you can also print output with printf
println(s"Your name is $name and you are $age years old.")

Discussion

The readLine method lets you prompt a user for input, but the other read* methods don’t, so you need to prompt the user manually with print, println, or printf.

You can list the Console.read* methods in the Scala REPL:

scala> Console.read
readBoolean   readByte   readChar   readDouble   readFloat
readInt       readLine   readLong   readShort    readf
readf1        readf2     readf3

Be careful with the methods that read numeric values; as you might expect, they can all throw a NumberFormatException.

Although these methods are thorough, if you prefer, you can also fall back and read input with the Java Scanner class:

// you can also use the Java Scanner class, if ...