This object defines a two-part parsing mechanism.

The first part is comprised of reading the raw input into an internal list of strings. Every item in this list corresponds to an actual file. All extraneous matter emitted by the server will have been removed by the end of this phase. This is accomplished in conjunction with the FTPFileEntryParser associated with this engine, by calling its methods readNextEntry() - which handles the issue of what delimits one entry from another, usually but not always a line feed and preParse() - which handles removal of extraneous matter such as the preliminary lines of a listing, removal of duplicates on versioning systems, etc.

The second part is composed of the actual parsing, again in conjunction with the particular parser used by this engine. This is controlled by an iterator over the internal list of strings. This may be done either in block mode, by calling the getNext() and getPrevious() methods to provide "paged" output of less than the whole list at one time, or by calling the getFiles() method to return the entire list.

Examples:

Paged access:

    FTPClient f=FTPClient();
    f.connect(server);
    f.login(username, password);
    FTPListParseEngine engine = f.initiateListParsing(directory);

    while (engine.hasNext()) {
       FTPFile[] files = engine.getNext(25);  // "page size" you want
       //do whatever you want with these files, display them, etc.
       //expensive FTPFile objects not created until needed.
    }

For unpaged access, simply use FTPClient.listFiles(). That method uses this class transparently.