Java Programming

Hello Everyone,

Firstly may I apologise for the un-educated nature of my post, as I am looking for some direction from a more experienced member of the java community.

Basically, I have been tasked to develop a peice of software which reads data from a telnet port. The port is used by our telecoms system to output call data periodically (every time a call is made/recieved etc). I have successfully connected using a telnet client to view this data. I somehow need to retrieve this data into a java programme. The data output is a string is made up of a collection of fields separated by commas.

Now my question is basically, how should I go about doing this. Can I use java sockets to retrieve this data? or do I need to use a telnet api of some kind? Also I assume that I need to establish some sort of constant connection, so that the programme can retrieve the string constantly, does anyone have any advise on how best I should do this?

And finally, this may seem the stupidest question yet.. but, as the data is output in a string format, I am assuming that there is no way of retrieving individual fields without having to do some sort of string manipulation separation using commas...

I appreciate any help or advise anyone can give me.
Thanks in advance for your time.

Andy.