I am used to the c-style getchar(), but it seems like there is nothing comparable for java. I am building a lexical analyzer, and I need to read in the input character by character.

I know I can use the scanner to scan in a token or line and parse through the token char-by-char, but that seems unwieldy for strings spanning multiple lines. Is there a way to just get the next character from the input buffer in Java, or should I just plug away with the Scanner class?

Edit: forgot to say where the input is coming from. The input is a file, not the keyboard.