Java, reading a file from current directory?

The current directory is not (necessarily) the directory the .class file is in. It's working directory of the process. (ie: the directory you were in when you started the JVM)

You can load files from the same directory^* as the .class file with getResourceAsStream(). That'll give you an InputStream which you can convert to a Reader with InputStreamReader.

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_{^*Note that this "directory" may actually be a jar file, depending on where the class was loaded from.}

Try

System.getProperty("user.dir")

It returns the current working directory.