Java Read File

Java provides its users with many ways of reading a file. To read a text file, you can use a FileReader, BufferedReader, or Scanner. Each utility offers something special for example, the BufferedReader provides data buffering for fast reads, and the Scanner provides analysis capabilities. The type of content in a file determines which file reader to use. Some methods are suited for faster implementation, and others are good at reading small file data. Some provide line-by-line read, while one of them reads file character by character. In the following article, we'll look at all of Java's ways to read files.

1. BufferedReader Class

To read text from a character-input stream, the class BufferedReader is utilized. It buffers characters to read input efficiently, including characters, arrays, or lines.

The buffer size is either determined by the user or by the default size, which can be used because it is large enough to handle most cases. It inherits the reader class using inheritance concepts. BufferedReader has two types of constructors, which are as follows:

• BufferedReader( Reader in): This will utilize BufferedReader's default size.
• BufferedReader (Reader in, int n): This will use the size specified by the user.

The above snippet of code is an example of how one can use BufferedReader to read contents from a file and print it.

In the first line, we have specified the path of the file. The file contains some text. We check whether the file is empty or not and then print the file's content. We can see files getting printed in the console as we run the program.

• FileReader: It may seem that FileReader shares similarities with BufferedReader but has many differences. Unlike  BufferedReader,  it isn't buffered in any way. It reads data from a file and extracts characters.
  It is, on the whole, slower and less efficient than BufferedReader.
  FileReader has the following Constructors.

• FileReader ( File file): It gets the file's name in the file instance.
• FileReader(String fileName): First, it opens the file. If the file is not present in the specified path, then it will throw FileNotFoundException

Unlike the BufferedReader, the text is printed word by word as FileReader extracts characters from a text file.

• Scanner class: The Scanner class can also be used to read text from a text file. Following are the constructors provided by the Scanner class in JavaJava.
• Scanner (File Source): This function reads data from a File object that represents a file.
• Scanner (InputStream source): To read data from an InputStream, call this method.
• Scanner (Path source): This method reads the file that the object specifies.

Following is an implementation of the Scanner class.

There's another way to read the entire file. Instead of using a while loop, we can use the following code;-

sc.useDelimiter("\\Z")

It’s a java scanner class. This is used to set the delimiting pattern for the Scanner being used. For this case, the Scanner pattern is used. It returns the scanner object.

To better understand, let's take the comparison between BufferedReader, FileReader, and Scanner.

BufferedReader	FileReader
It is buffered	It is not buffered
It uses a buffer to read data.	It reads data from a  file.
It buffers the character.	It obtains characters from a file.
Comparatively faster	Comparatively slower.
More efficient for reading files	Comparatively less efficient.
It can read a single character as well as the whole line.	At any given time, just one character can be read.

BufferedReader	Scanner
It comes with a bigger buffer memory.	It has a smaller buffer memory.
It is synchronous.	It is not synchronous.
It is comparatively faster.	It is comparatively slower.
It should be used when we are working with multiple threads.	It should be used when we are not working with multiple threads.

• Reading the whole file in a List: In Java 7, a convenient method for reading a file as lines of text was added. The method List<String> is used to do so. Bytes from the record are decoded into characters to use the desired charset. This approach guarantees that the record is closed while all bytes had been examined or an I/O error, or different runtime exception, is thrown.

Syntax

public static List readAllLines(Path path, Charset cs)throws IOException

In the above code, we have stored all the data of the file inside a list whose reference variable is read. Apple is the name of our file.

To print the data stored in the list, we have used a while loop, which first iterates over the list and then prints the data inside the list until the list doesn't get empty. When we run the program above, the following is the result we get.

• Read a text file as String: This is the normal method for reading the entire file as a String in Java, with the caveat that the file must be small or medium in size. Unlike the above method, which stores the whole file data in  List, this method stores all the file's data in a  String.

The above code snippet has implemented the knowledge of reading the text file as a string. Apple is the name of our file, and as you can see from the above code, we have read all the data present inside the file name apple using String. And to print the data from files, we have just printed the String. Following is the result of our code.

Conclusion

As we have mentioned all the methods to read the file in JavaJava, one might get confused to implement. Even though we have mentioned the use case of almost every method, one might be looking for the best way to read a file. Mentioning one method as the best is quite tricky as it varies with what you need and what you are implementing.

While comparing all the file reading methods and analyzing their implementation, we can assume that; the fastest way to read a file is by implementing the concept of BufferedReader. It is fast enough to read millions of lines in a second with its implementation compared to other available methods.