The Scanner class in Java is a part of the java.util package and is used to read input from various sources like keyboard, files, and streams. It's a simple text scanner which can parse primitive types and strings using regular expressions. A Scanner breaks its input into tokens using a delimiter, which by default matches whitespace.

Basic Usage of Scanner

To use the Scanner class, you need to create an instance of the class. When reading from the keyboard, you can pass System.in to the constructor of the Scanner class. For example:

For parsing strings, you can pass the string directly to the Scanner constructor:

Reading Input with Scanner

The Scanner class provides various methods to read different data types. For instance, nextInt() to read an integer, nextDouble() for a double, nextLine() for a String, and so on. Here's a simple example of reading different types of input: