Question

I feel like this is a bad practice to store a file inside a string. Is there an alternative way to do this, because I want to compare a list of keys and do an indexOf(key) on the file. The key could be anywhere in the file.

Answer 1

You could use a BufferedReader to pull in the data a chunk at a time:

    BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(
            new FileReader(file));
    char[] buf = new char[1024];
    int numRead=0;
    while((numRead=reader.read(buf)) != -1){
        String readData = String.valueOf(buf, 0, numRead);

…

and test each small string. You’d need to keep track of the index, but this would use much less memory.