Question

I have this code to sort a text file using arrays in java, but it always discard the first line of the text while sorting.

Here is my code:

import java.io.*;

public class Main {

    public static int count(String filename) throws IOException {
        InputStream is = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(filename));
        try {
            byte[] c = new byte[1024];
            int count = 0;
            int readChars = 0;
            while ((readChars = is.read(c)) != -1) {
                for (int i = 0; i < readChars; ++i) {
                    if (c[i] == '\n') {
                        ++count;
                    }
                }
            }
            return count;
        } finally {
            is.close();
        }
    }

    public static String[] getContents(File aFile) throws IOException {

        String[] words = new String[count(aFile.getName()) + 1];

        BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(aFile));

        String line = null; //not declared within while loop
        int i = 0;
        while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) {
            words[i] = line;
            i++;
        }

        java.util.Arrays.sort(words);
        for (int k = 0; k < words.length; k++) {
            System.out.println(words[k]);
        }
        return words;
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

        File testFile = new File("try.txt");
        getContents(testFile);

    }
}

Here is the text file try.txt:

Daisy
Jane
Amanda
Barbara
Alexandra
Ezabile

the output is:

Alexandra
Amanda
Barbara
Ezabile
Jane
Daisy

To solve this problem I have to insert an empty line in the beginning of the text file, is there a way not to do that? I don’t know what goes wrong?

Answer 1

I compiled your code (on a Mac) and it works for me. Try opening the file in a hexeditor and see if there is some special character at the beginning of your file. That might be causing the sorting to be incorrect for the first line.