Java reading a file into an ArrayList?

Question

How do you read the contents of a file into an ArrayList in Java?

Here are the file contents:

cat
ho         


        

Answer 1

You can use:

List<String> list = Files.readAllLines(new File("input.txt").toPath(), Charset.defaultCharset() );

Source: Java API 7.0

Answer 2

Here is an entire program example:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Scanner;

public class X {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
    File f = new File("D:/projects/eric/eclipseworkspace/testing2/usernames.txt");
        try{
            ArrayList<String> lines = get_arraylist_from_file(f);
            for(int x = 0; x < lines.size(); x++){
                System.out.println(lines.get(x));
            }
        }
        catch(Exception e){
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
        System.out.println("done");

    }
    public static ArrayList<String> get_arraylist_from_file(File f) 
        throws FileNotFoundException {
        Scanner s;
        ArrayList<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
        s = new Scanner(f);
        while (s.hasNext()) {
            list.add(s.next());
        }
        s.close();
        return list;
    }
}

Answer 3

You can for example do this in this way (full code with exceptions handlig):

BufferedReader in = null;
List<String> myList = new ArrayList<String>();
try {   
    in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("myfile.txt"));
    String str;
    while ((str = in.readLine()) != null) {
        myList.add(str);
    }
} catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
} finally {
    if (in != null) {
        in.close();
    }
}

Answer 4

//CS124 HW6 Wikipedia Relation Extraction
//Alan Joyce (ajoyce)
public List<String> addWives(String fileName) {
    List<String> wives = new ArrayList<String>();
    try {
        BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName));
        // for each line
        for(String line = input.readLine(); line != null; line = input.readLine()) {
            wives.add(line);
        }
        input.close();
    } catch(IOException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        System.exit(1);
        return null;
    }
    return wives;
}

Answer 5

To share some analysis info. With a simple test how long it takes to read ~1180 lines of values.

If you need to read the data very fast, use the good old BufferedReader FileReader example. It took me ~8ms

The Scanner is much slower. Took me ~138ms

The nice Java 8 Files.lines(...) is the slowest version. Took me ~388ms.

Answer 6

In Java 8 you could use streams and Files.lines:

List<String> list = null;
try (Stream<String> lines = Files.lines(myPathToTheFile))) {
    list = lines.collect(Collectors.toList());
} catch (IOException e) {
    LOGGER.error("Failed to load file.", e);
}

Or as a function including loading the file from the file system:

private List<String> loadFile() {
    List<String> list = null;
    URI uri = null;

    try {
        uri = ClassLoader.getSystemResource("example.txt").toURI();
    } catch (URISyntaxException e) {
        LOGGER.error("Failed to load file.", e);
    }

    try (Stream<String> lines = Files.lines(Paths.get(uri))) {
        list = lines.collect(Collectors.toList());
    } catch (IOException e) {
        LOGGER.error("Failed to load file.", e);
    }
    return list;
}