Re: problems reading binary file

From:
Nigel Wade <nmw@ion.le.ac.uk>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Wed, 9 Jun 2010 13:54:10 +0000 (UTC)
Message-ID:
<huo6e2$jbq$6@south.jnrs.ja.net>
On Wed, 09 Jun 2010 10:14:29 +0000, Thomas Pornin wrote:

You _might_ correct your code by using Float.float.toRawIntBits()
instead of Float.floatToIntBits(), but even if it works, it is
non-robust (it assumes that DataInputStream also does things that way).
A more correct way of doing things is to read the bytes as an "int"
directly, which basically removes steps 2 and 3 altogether. This would
look like this:

    System.out.print(Float.intBitsToFloat(swap(in.readInt())) + " ");


I prefer to load the data into a byte array, then use a ByteBuffer to
access the data directly from memory in the "correct" format. Everything
necessary is already available in the standard API classes, no manual bit
shifting, byte-swapping etc. is required.

The basic scenario is:

 create a ByteBuffer
 set it to ByteBuffer.LITTLE_ENDIAN

 loop:

   read block of data into byte[]
   wrap ByteBuffer around byte[]
   read data from ByteBuffer

E.g. this is an extract of some code which is run routinely here, and
reads little-endian data files:

  DataInputStream dataIn;
  short fitRecordLength;
  short inxRecordLength;
....

  // read the fit and inx lengths (this is little endian)
  byte[] lengthBytes = new byte[4];
  dataIn.readFully( lengthBytes );
        
  // wrap the byte array in a ByteBuffer, this allows
  // reading of little endian data
  ByteBuffer bb = ByteBuffer.wrap( lengthBytes );
  bb.order( ByteOrder.LITTLE_ENDIAN );
        
  fitRecordLength = bb.getShort();
  inxRecordLength = bb.getShort();
....

  ByteBuffer dataBuffer;
  byte[] bufferArray;
  bufferArray = new byte[fitRecordLength];
  dataBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap( bufferArray );
  dataBuffer.order( ByteOrder.LITTLE_ENDIAN );

  dataIn.readFully( bufferArray );
  dataBuffer.position( 0 );
 
  int recordNumber = dataBuffer.getInt();

--
Nigel Wade

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