Scanner.hasNextLine() method is not seeing next lines in the file

I have the following code:

Scanner scanner = new Scanner (file);
while (scanner.hasNextLine()){
     System.out.println ("Next line");
     String line = scanner.nextLine();

}

At first the print statement never executed. I thought that was odd because the file is an xml file with about 2,000 lines. For kicks I tried inserting the following before initializing the Scanner object:

try{
    Desktop.getDesktop().open(file);
} catch (Exception e){}

When I ran the program, the file was opened AND the print statement executed all 2,000 times (meaning scanner.hasNextLine() worked). I thought it was an issue pertaining to permissions so commented out the code above and I tried:

file.setWritable(true);
file.setExecutable(true);
file.setReadable(true);

scanner.hasNextLine() went back to not working and the print statement was never executed. What am I doing wrong?

UPDATE:

entire function looks like this:

public void addToList (File file){
    try{
        file.setWritable(true);
        file.setExecutable(true);
        file.setReadable(true);

        if (file.exists())
            System.out.println("File exists");
        Scanner scanner = new Scanner (file, "UTF-8");
        int lineCount=0;
        while (scanner.hasNextLine()){
            System.out.println("Next line");
            String line = scanner.nextLine();
        }

    }

    catch (FileNotFoundException e){
        System.err.println (e.getMessage());
    }

}

where file is an absolute path