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Asked: 2026-05-18T20:42:29+00:00

I have a large file (English Wikipedia articles only database as XML files). I

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I have a large file (English Wikipedia articles only database as XML files). I am reading one character at a time using BufferedReader. The pseudocode is:

file = BufferedReader...

while (file.ready())
    character = file.read()

Is this actually valid? Or will ready just return false when it is waiting for the HDD to return data and not actually when the EOF has been reached? I tried to use if (file.read() == -1) but seemed to run into an infinite loop that I literally could not find.

I am just wondering if it is reading the whole file as my statistics say 444,380 Wikipedia pages have been read but I thought there were many more articles.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This is not guaranteed to read the whole input. ready() just tells you if the underlying stream has some content ready. If it is abstracting over a network socket or file, for example, it could mean that there isn’t any buffered data available yet.

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