Usual approaches:1) Read a line (enter-terminated), the use string tokenizer to tokenize (slice) the string into substrings before parsing them for numbers. Sample code fragment: BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in)); String s = in.readLine(); StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(s, ", \t\f\n"); int[] num = new int[3]; for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) { String n = st.nextToken(); num[i] = Integer.parseInt(n); } //I didn't check for valid input/correct number of input here. You've got to patch those possible errors. 2) This approach is more difficult to learn, but much more elegant. Use java.text.MessageFormat class to perform a formated input parsing. It is similar to the way C handles input (format string pattern matching), but its syntax is different, and is in some sense more flexible.