what's the fastest way to scan a very large file in java?
Imagine I have a very large text file. Performance really matters. All I want to do is to scan it to look for a certain string. Maybe I want to count how many I have of those, but it really is not the point. The point is: what's the fastest way ? I don't care about maintainance it needs to be fast. Fast is key. For a one off search use a Scanner , as suggested here A simple technique that could well be considerably faster than indexOf() is to use a Scanner, with the method findWithinHorizon(). If you use a constructor that takes a File object, Scanner will internally make a FileChannel to read