Question

I’m trying to delete a line of text from a text file without copying to a temporary file. I am trying to do this by using a Printwriter and a Scanner and having them traverse the file at the same time, the writer writing what the Scanner reads and overwriting each line with the same thing, until it gets to the line that I wish to delete. Then, I advance the Scanner but not the writer, and continue as before. Here is the code:

But first, the parameters: My file names are numbers, so this would read 1.txt or 2.txt, etc, and so f specifies the file name. I convert it to a String in the constructor for a file. Int n is the index of the line that I want to delete.

public void deleteLine(int f, int n){
 try{
 Scanner reader = new Scanner(new File(f+".txt")); 
 PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter(new FileWriter(new File(f+".txt")),false); 
 for(int w=0; w<n; w++)
   writer.write(reader.nextLine()); 
 reader.nextLine(); 
 while(reader.hasNextLine())
   writer.write(reader.nextLine());
 } catch(Exception e){
   System.err.println("Enjoy the stack trace!");
   e.printStackTrace();
 }
}

It gives me strange errors. It says “NoSuchElementException” and “no line found” in the stack trace. It points to different lines; it seems that any of the nextLine() calls can do this. Is it possible to delete a line this way? If so, what am I doing wrong? If not, why? (BTW, just in case you’d want this, the text file is about 500 lines. I don’t know if that counts as large or even matters, though.)

Answer 1

As others have pointed out, you might be better off using a temporary file, if there’s a slightest risk that your program crashes mid way:

public static void removeNthLine(String f, int toRemove) throws IOException {

    File tmp = File.createTempFile("tmp", "");

    BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(f));
    BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(tmp));

    for (int i = 0; i < toRemove; i++)
        bw.write(String.format("%s%n", br.readLine()));

    br.readLine();

    String l;
    while (null != (l = br.readLine()))
        bw.write(String.format("%s%n", l));

    br.close();
    bw.close();

    File oldFile = new File(f);
    if (oldFile.delete())
        tmp.renameTo(oldFile);

}

(Beware of the sloppy treatment of encodings, new-line characters and exception handling.)

---

However, I don’t like answering questions with “I won’t tell you how, because you shouldn’t do it anyway.“. (In some other situation for instance, you may be working with a file that’s larger than half your hard drive!) So here goes:

You need to use a RandomAccessFile instead. Using this class you can both read and write to the file using the same object:

public static void removeNthLine(String f, int toRemove) throws IOException {
    RandomAccessFile raf = new RandomAccessFile(f, "rw");

    // Leave the n first lines unchanged.
    for (int i = 0; i < toRemove; i++)
        raf.readLine();

    // Shift remaining lines upwards.
    long writePos = raf.getFilePointer();
    raf.readLine();
    long readPos = raf.getFilePointer();

    byte[] buf = new byte[1024];
    int n;
    while (-1 != (n = raf.read(buf))) {
        raf.seek(writePos);
        raf.write(buf, 0, n);
        readPos += n;
        writePos += n;
        raf.seek(readPos);
    }

    raf.setLength(writePos);
    raf.close();
}