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Java code optimization, replacing all chars in a file

I have tried doing it like this:
import java.io.*;
public class ConvertChar {
public static void main(String args[]) {
Long now = System.nanoTime();
String nomCompletFichier = "C:\\Users\\aahamed\\Desktop\\test\\test.xml";
Convert(nomCompletFichier);
Long inter = System.nanoTime() - now;
System.out.println(inter);
}
public static void Convert(String nomCompletFichier) {
FileWriter writer = null;
BufferedReader reader = null;
try {
File file = new File(nomCompletFichier);
reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file));
String oldtext = "";
while (reader.ready()) {
oldtext += reader.readLine() + "\n";
}
reader.close();
// replace a word in a file
// String newtext = oldtext.replaceAll("drink", "Love");
// To replace a line in a file
String newtext = oldtext.replaceAll("&(?!amp;)", "&");
writer = new FileWriter(file);
writer.write(newtext);
writer.close();
} catch (IOException ioe) {
ioe.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
However the code above takes more time to execute than creating two different files:
import java.io.*;
public class ConvertChar {
public static void main(String args[]) {
Long now = System.nanoTime();
String nomCompletFichier = "C:\\Users\\aahamed\\Desktop\\test\\test.xml";
Convert(nomCompletFichier);
Long inter = System.nanoTime() - now;
System.out.println(inter);
}
private static void Convert(String nomCompletFichier) {
BufferedReader br = null;
BufferedWriter bw = null;
try {
File file = new File(nomCompletFichier);
File tempFile = File.createTempFile("buffer", ".tmp");
bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(tempFile, true));
br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file));
while (br.ready()) {
bw.write(br.readLine().replaceAll("&(?!amp;)", "&") + "\n");
}
bw.close();
br.close();
file.delete();
tempFile.renameTo(file);
} catch (IOException e) {
// writeLog("Erreur lors de la conversion des caractères : " + e.getMessage(), 0);
} finally {
try {
bw.close();
} catch (Exception ignore) {
}
try {
br.close();
} catch (Exception ignore) {
}
}
}
}
Is there any way to do the 2nd code without creating a temp file and reducing the execution time? I am doing a code optimization.

The main reason why your first program is slow is probably that it's building up the string oldtext incrementally. The problem with that is that each time you add another line to it it may need to make a copy of it. Since each copy takes time roughly proportional to the length of the string being copied, your execution time will scale like the square of the size of your input file.
You can check whether this is your problem by trying with files of different lengths and seeing how the runtime depends on the file size.
If so, one easy way to get around the problem is Java's StringBuilder class which is intended for exactly this task: building up a large string incrementally.

The main culprit in your first example is that you're building oldtext inefficiently using String concatenations, as explained here. This allocates a new string for every concatenation. Java provides you StringBuilder for building strings:
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder;
while(reader.ready()){
builder.append(reader.readLine());
builder.append("\n");
}
String oldtext = builder.toString();
You can also do the replacement when you're building your text in StringBuilder. Another problem with your code is that you shouldn't use ready() to check if there is some content left in the file - check the result of readLine(). Finally, closing the stream should be in a finally or try-with-resources block. The result could look like this:
StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
try (BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file))) {
String line = reader.readLine();
while (line != null) {
builder.append(line.replaceAll("&(?!amp;)", "&"));
builder.append('\n');
line = reader.readLine();
}
}
String newText = builder.toString();
Writing to a temporary file is a good solution too, though. The amount of I/O, which is the slowest to handle, is the same in both cases - read the full content once, write result once.

Unable to a read a large file using BufferedReader in Java

I am trying to read a file using BufferedReader, but when I tried to print, It is returning some weird characters.
Code of reading file is:
private static String readJsonFile(String fileName) throws IOException{
BufferedReader br = null;
try {
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));
String line = br.readLine();
while(line != null ){
sb.append(line);
System.out.println(line);
line=br.readLine();
}
return sb.toString();
} finally{
br.close();
}
}
This function is being called as :
String jsonString = null;
try {
jsonString = readJsonFile(fileName);
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
But when I tried to print this in console using System.out.println(jsonString);, It is returning some fancy pictures.
Note: It is Working file when file size is small.
Is there any limit on size of file it can read ?

You're using the platform default encoding to read the file, which is probably encoded in UTF8. Check the actual encoding of the file, and specify the encoding:
BufferedReader r = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream("...", StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
Note that since you simply want to read everything from the file, you could simply use
String json = new String(Files.readAllBytes(...), StandardCharsets.UTF_8);

Reading in from text file character by character

In Java, is there a way of reading a file (text file) in a way that it would only read one character at a time, rather than String by String. This is for the purpose of an extremely basic lexical analyzer, so you can understand why I'd want such a method. Thank you.

Here's a sample code for reading / writing one character at a time
public class CopyCharacters {
public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
FileReader inputStream = null;
FileWriter outputStream = null;
try {
inputStream = new FileReader("xanadu.txt");
outputStream = new FileWriter("characteroutput.txt");
int c;
while ((c = inputStream.read()) != -1) {
outputStream.write(c);
}
} finally {
if (inputStream != null) {
inputStream.close();
}
if (outputStream != null) {
outputStream.close();
}
}
}
}
Note, this answer was updated to copy the sample code from the Ref link, but I see this is essentially the same answer given below.
ref:
http://download.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/io/charstreams.html

You can use the read method from the InputStreamReader class which reads one character from the stream and returns -1 when it reaches the end of the stream
public static void processFile(File file) throws IOException {
try (InputStream in = new FileInputStream(file);
Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(in)) {
int c;
while ((c = reader.read()) != -1) {
processChar((char) c); // this method will do whatever you want
}
}
}

You can read the whole file (if it is not much big) in the memory as string, and iterate on the string character by character

There are several possible solutions. Generally you can use any Reader from java.io package for reading characters, e.g.:
// Read from file
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("file.txt"));
// Read from sting
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new StringReader("Some text"));

How can I read a .txt file into a single Java string while maintaining line breaks?

Virtually every code example out there reads a TXT file line-by-line and stores it in a String array. I do not want line-by-line processing because I think it's an unnecessary waste of resources for my requirements: All I want to do is quickly and efficiently dump the .txt contents into a single String. The method below does the job, however with one drawback:
private static String readFileAsString(String filePath) throws java.io.IOException{
byte[] buffer = new byte[(int) new File(filePath).length()];
BufferedInputStream f = null;
try {
f = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(filePath));
f.read(buffer);
if (f != null) try { f.close(); } catch (IOException ignored) { }
} catch (IOException ignored) { System.out.println("File not found or invalid path.");}
return new String(buffer);
}
... the drawback is that the line breaks are converted into long spaces e.g. " ".
I want the line breaks to be converted from \n or \r to <br> (HTML tag) instead.
Thank you in advance.

What about using a Scanner and adding the linefeeds yourself:
sc = new java.util.Scanner ("sample.txt")
while (sc.hasNext ()) {
buf.append (sc.nextLine ());
buf.append ("<br />");
}
I don't see where you get your long spaces from.

You can read directly into the buffer and then create a String from the buffer:
File f = new File(filePath);
FileInputStream fin = new FileInputStream(f);
byte[] buffer = new byte[(int) f.length()];
new DataInputStream(fin).readFully(buffer);
fin.close();
String s = new String(buffer, "UTF-8");

You could add this code:
return new String(buffer).replaceAll("(\r\n|\r|\n|\n\r)", "<br>");
Is this what you are looking for?

The code will read the file contents as they appear in the file - including line breaks.
If you want to change the breaks into something else like displaying in html etc, you will either need to post process it or do it by reading the file line by line. Since you do not want the latter, you can replace your return by following which should do the conversion -
return (new String(buffer)).replaceAll("\r[\n]?", "<br>");

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
try {
InputStream is = getAssets().open("myfile.txt");
byte[] bytes = new byte[1024];
int numRead = 0;
try {
while((numRead = is.read(bytes)) != -1)
sb.append(new String(bytes, 0, numRead));
}
catch(IOException e) {
}
is.close();
}
catch(IOException e) {
}
your resulting String: String result = sb.toString();
then replace whatever you want in this result.

I agree with the general approach by #Sanket Patel, but using Commons I/O you would likely want File Utils.
So your code word look like:
String myString = FileUtils.readFileToString(new File(filePath));
There is also another version to specify an alternate character encoding.

You should try org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils.toString(InputStream is) to get file content as String. There you can pass InputStream object which you will get from
getAssets().open("xml2json.txt") *<<- belongs to Android, which returns InputStream*
in your Activity. To get String use this :
String xml = IOUtils.toString((getAssets().open("xml2json.txt")));
So,
String xml = IOUtils.toString(*pass_your_InputStream_object_here*);

How to output formatted html in java

I'm reading an html file like this:
try {
BufferedReader bufferReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(path));
String content;
while((content = bufferReader.readLine()) != null) {
result += content;
}
bufferReader.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
return e.getMessage();
}
And I want to display it in a GWT textArea, in which i give it to as a String. But the string loses indentations and comes out as a one-liner text. Is there a way to display it properly formatted (with indentations) ?

That's probably because readLine() chops off the end-of-line character(s). Add them yourself again for each line.
Besides that, use a StringBuilder instead of using += to a String in a loop:
try {
BufferedReader bufferReader = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(path));
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
String content;
while ((content = bufferReader.readLine()) != null) {
sb.append(content);
sb.append('\n'); // Add line separator
}
bufferReader.close();
} catch (Exception e) {
return e.getMessage();
}
String result = sb.toString();

Well, assuming your textArea understands HTML (I don't know GWT specifically), why don't you prefix it with <pre> then append </pre>?
You'll may still have to escape all the HTML special characters such as & to & and < to <.

It might be more efficient to use a FileReader instead--there's no reason why you have to read the text line-by-line. Like Jesper suggested, using a StringBuilder to build your String is more efficient. Also, with FileReader, you don't have to manually append any newlines:
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
FileReader in = null;
try {
in = new FileReader(path);
int read;
char buf[] = new char[4096];
while ((read = in.read(buf)) != -1) {
sb.append(buf, 0, read);
}
} catch (Exception e) {
return e.getMessage();
} finally {
in.close();
}
String result = sb.toString();

If your HTML happens to be XHTML, then one thing you can try is to put it into an XML parser such as jdom or dom4j, which usually has some "pretty-print" option.