java read text files_Java Read a text file line by line

This article covers 3 ways to read a text file line by line :

Java NIO libraries – FileChannel to read the files. It is a non-blocking mode of reading files

BufferedReader – Which is a blocking operation i.e it blocks any other read/write request to the file until it has completed the task.

Apache Commons IO – FileUtils, simpler way to read files line by line. It is also a blocking operation.

The input file for each example is same as the one shown below:

src/com/mkyong/data.txt

1. Java NIO libraries

The example presents the simplest way of reading a small file. Since this is a small file, we directly allocate required memory to ByteBuffer using FileChannel size.

NIOFileReadExample.java

package com.mkyong;

import java.io.IOException;

import java.io.RandomAccessFile;

import java.nio.ByteBuffer;

import java.nio.channels.FileChannel;

public class NIOFileReadExample {

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

RandomAccessFile file = new RandomAccessFile("src/com/mkyong/data.txt", "r");

FileChannel channel = file.getChannel();

System.out.println("File size is: " + channel.size());

ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.allocate((int) channel.size());

channel.read(buffer);

buffer.flip();//Restore buffer to position 0 to read it

System.out.println("Reading content and printing ... ");

for (int i = 0; i < channel.size(); i++) {

System.out.print((char) buffer.get());

channel.close();

file.close();

On executing the code you get the below output:

File size is: 19

Reading content and printing ...

2. BufferedReader

ReadTextFile.java

package com.mkyong;

import java.io.BufferedReader;

import java.io.File;

import java.io.FileReader;

import java.io.IOException;

public class ReadTextFile {

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

try {

File f = new File("src/com/mkyong/data.txt");

BufferedReader b = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(f));

String readLine = "";

System.out.println("Reading file using Buffered Reader");

while ((readLine = b.readLine()) != null) {

System.out.println(readLine);

} catch (IOException e) {

e.printStackTrace();

The output on executing this code will be as shown below:

Reading file using Buffered Reader

3. Apache Commons IO

pom.xml

commons-io

commons-io

2.5

FileIOUtilsExample

package com.mkyong;

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;

import java.io.File;

import java.io.IOException;

import java.util.List;

public class ReadTextFile {

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

try {

File f = new File("src/com/mkyong/data.txt");

System.out.println("Reading files using Apache IO:");

List lines = FileUtils.readLines(f, "UTF-8");

for (String line : lines) {

System.out.println(line);

} catch (IOException e) {

e.printStackTrace();

The output on executing above code will be:

Reading files using Apache IO:

References