Re: Speeding up reading from files

From:
Lew <lew@lewscanon.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:33:21 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<c0c78881-45b6-4af8-a7d8-e25d979d7fd2@c4g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>
Mark wrote:

I am using a BufferedReader to read character data in from a file. It
works but it's incredibly slow. (The file consists of a number of
separate messages, each separated by a special character. Each
message must be read into a separate string.)


Aside from the good answers others have provided, some additional side
remarks:

I use the following code (exception handling removed for brevity):


Most of the example removed for too much brevity.

            String text = new String("");


Why not 'text = ""'?

            BufferedReader in = null;


Why in the world would you assign to 'null' first, then discard that
initialization immediately?

            in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(n=

ew

FileInputStream(_msgFile)));
            int c;


Put 'c' in the loop body; its scope is too wide here. Actually,
follow others' advice here and don't read the input character by
character but buffer by buffer, as Roedy said.

            while ((c = in.read()) != -1) {
                if (c == '@') {
                    _msgList.add(text);


We'll assume an appropriate definition for '_msgList', but notice that
the variable name violates the Java coding conventions.

                    text = "";
                } else {
                    text += (char)c;


Yes, Roedy's advice to use 'StringBuilder' will speed this up
considerably, and save heap memory.

                }
            }
            if (text.length() > 0) {
                _msgList.add(text);
            }


<http://sscce.org/>

--
Lew

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