Question

I’m trying to find a nice way to compare two strings when reading line by line in parallel.
The reason i want to do that without using equals method or such is because the strings are not exactly the same, to be more accurate i’ll give an example.

String s1 = "aaa\nbbb\nccc\ddd"
String s2 = "aaa\n\rbbb\n\rccc\n\rddd"

As u can see both strings has same values when we are looking line by line (though are not completly equal since s2 has also \r in it).
Now, i know i can use some remove method to clean that “\r” but since the string can be very large, i prefer looping row by row and once the strings are not equal to break my logic.
In other words i prefer iterating only the needed rows instead of cleanning the entrie string from \r.

edited: i am not reading from a file. these are plain strings.

Any ideas 🙂 ?

Answer 1

Since you said the string can be very large, I guess you are reading from a file. When you use a BufferedReader and use the readLine(); method, you will get line by line, without line separators. Now, you can use equals().

BufferedReader reader1 = ...; // depends on your source
BufferedReader reader2 = ...; // depends on your source

String line1 = null;
String line2 = null;

while ((line1 = reader1.readLine()) != null && (line2 = reader2.readLine()) != null)
{
     if (line1.equals(line2))
     {

     }
}