Question: I want to implement a help system for my tiny SWT desktop application.

I've thought about a SWT browser widget containing a single html markup page and a set of anchors to navigate (there are only very few things to explain).

Everything works fine, but how do I load the html file from a jar?

I know about`getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("foo");`, but what is the best practice when reading from the input stream? The answer to [Load a resource contained in a jar](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/574809/java-load-a-resource-contained-in-a-jar) dissuades using a `FileInputStream`.

Thanks in advance

Answer: 
Well, I found a rather simple solution that obviously just works:

```
InputStream in = getClass().getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream("html/index.html");
Scanner scanner = new Scanner(in);
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
while(scanner.hasNextLine()) {
    buffer.append(scanner.nextLine());
}

browser.setText(buffer.toString());

```
i tend to use commons-io for such a task giving me simple abstraction methods like `IOUtils.toString(InputStream in);` and leaving the choice of best implementations to the able people at apache ;)

commons-io: <http://commons.apache.org/io/>

apidocs: <http://commons.apache.org/io/api-release/index.html>