Efficient way of handling file pointers in Java? (Using BufferedReader with file pointer)

Question

I have a log file which gets updated every second. I need to read the log file periodically, and once I do a read, I need to store the file pointer position at the end of t

Answer 1

Neil Coffey's solution is good if you are reading fixed length files. However for files that have variable length (data keep coming in) there are some problems with using BufferedReader directly on FileInputStream or FileChannel inputstream via an InputStreamReader. For ex consider the cases

• 1) You want to read data from some offset to current file length. So you use BR on FileInputStream/FileChannel(via an InputStreamReader) and use its readLine method. But while you are busy reading the data let say some data got added which causes BF's readLine to read more data than what you expected(the previous file length)

• 2) You finished readLine stuff but when you try to read the current file length/channel position some data got added suddenly which causes the current file length/channel position to increase but you have already read less data than this.

In both of the above cases it is difficult to know the actual data you have read (you cannot just use the length of data read using readLine because it skips some chars like carriage return)

So it is better to read the data in buffered bytes and use a BufferedReader wrapper around this. I wrote some methods like this

/** Read data from offset to length bytes in RandomAccessFile using BufferedReader
 * @param offset
 * @param length
 * @param accessFile
 * @throws IOException
 */
    public static void readBufferedLines(long offset, long length, RandomAccessFile accessFile) throws IOException{
    if(accessFile == null) return;
    int bufferSize = BYTE_BUFFER_SIZE;// constant say 4096

    if(offset < length && offset >= 0){ 
        int index = 1;
        long curPosition = offset;
        /*
         * iterate (length-from)/BYTE_BUFFER_SIZE times to read into buffer no matter where new line occurs
         */
        while((curPosition + (index * BYTE_BUFFER_SIZE)) <  length){        

            accessFile.seek(offset); // seek to last parsed data rather than last data read in to buffer

            byte[] buf = new byte[bufferSize];
            int read = accessFile.read(buf, 0, bufferSize);
            index++;// Increment whether or not read successful

            if(read > 0){

                int lastnewLine = getLastLine(read,buf);

                if(lastnewLine <= 0){ // no new line found in the buffer reset buffer size and continue
                    bufferSize = bufferSize+read;
                    continue;

                }
                else{
                    bufferSize = BYTE_BUFFER_SIZE;
                }

                readLine(buf, 0, lastnewLine); // read the lines from buffer and parse the line

                offset = offset+lastnewLine; // update the last data read

            }

        }



        // Read last chunk. The last chunk size in worst case is the total file when no newline occurs 
        if(offset < length){

            accessFile.seek(offset); 
            byte[] buf = new byte[(int) (length-offset)];
            int read = accessFile.read(buf, 0, buf.length);

            if(read > 0){

                readLine(buf, 0, read);

                offset = offset+read; // update the last data read


            }
        }


    }

}

private static void readLine(byte[] buf, int from , int lastnewLine) throws IOException{

    String readLine = "";
    BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new ByteArrayInputStream(buf,from,lastnewLine) ));
    while( (readLine =  reader.readLine()) != null){
        //do something with readLine
        System.out.println(readLine);
    }
    reader.close();
}


private static int getLastLine(int read, byte[] buf) {
    if(buf == null ) return -1;
    if(read > buf.length) read = buf.length;
    while( read > 0 && !(buf[read-1] == '\n' || buf[read-1] == '\r')) read--;       
    return read;
}   
 public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
    RandomAccessFile accessFile = new RandomAccessFile("C:/sri/test.log",    "r");
    readBufferedLines(0, accessFile.length(), accessFile);
    accessFile.close();

}

Answer 2

A couple of ways that should work:

• open the file using a FileInputStream, skip() the relevant number of bytes, then wrap the BufferedReader around the stream (via an InputStreamReader);
• open the file (with either FileInputStream or RandomAccessFile), call getChannel() on the stream/RandomAccessFile to get an underlying FileChannel, call position() on the channel, then call Channels.newInputStream() to get an input stream from the channel, which you can pass to InputStreamReader -> BufferedReader.

I haven't honestly profiled these to see which is better performance-wise, but you should see which works better in your situation.

The problem with RandomAccessFile is essentially that its readLine() method is very inefficient. If it's convenient for you to read from the RAF and do your own buffering to split the lines, then there's nothing wrong with RAF per se-- just that its readLine() is poorly implemented

Answer 3

I had a similar problem, and I created this class to take lines from BufferedStream, and count how many bytes you have read so far by using getBytes(). We assume the line separator has a single byte by default, and we re-instance the BufferedReader for seek() to work.

public class FileCounterIterator {

    public Long position() {
        return _position;
    }

    public Long fileSize() {
        return _fileSize;
    }

    public FileCounterIterator newlineLength(Long newNewlineLength) {
        this._newlineLength = newNewlineLength;
        return this;
    }

    private Long _fileSize = 0L;
    private Long _position = 0L;
    private Long _newlineLength = 1L;
    private RandomAccessFile fp;
    private BufferedReader itr;

    public FileCounterIterator(String filename) throws IOException {
        fp = new RandomAccessFile(filename, "r");
        _fileSize = fp.length();
        this.seek(0L);
    }

    public FileCounterIterator seek(Long newPosition) throws IOException {
        this.fp.seek(newPosition);
        this._position = newPosition;
        itr = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(fp.getFD())));
        return this;
    }

    public Boolean hasNext() throws IOException {
        return this._position < this._fileSize;
    }

    public String readLine() throws IOException {
        String nextLine = itr.readLine();
        this._position += nextLine.getBytes().length + _newlineLength;
        return nextLine;
    }
}