Question

this is my first post here. I’m excited to finally take part.

I’m working on a project where I’m parsing obscure files types. I need to be able to parse word (which I’ve already done), .sbs, .day, .cmp, and more. All of these types can be opened simply with notepad and displayed.

Since I’m so new to this stuff, is there a way I can use some generic library (or two) to open all of these up? And if so what library would it be?

What’s a best practice in this sort of circumstance?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You could use the Apache Commons IO library. FileUtils class has several methods that receives the file path and optionlly the file encoding.

If you just want to only read text files and save them to a text variable

java.io.File file = new java.io.File("C:\\dir\\file.cmp");
String allWordAndLines = org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.readFileToString(file);

If you want each line separately and store them in a collection:

java.util.List<String> lines = org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.readLines(file);
for(String line : lines) {
    // do something with line
}

To specify the encoding, you need to add another parameter:

org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.readFileToString(file, "UTF-8");
org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.readLines(file, "Cp1252");

Java include several classes for read files, see more in http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/essential/io/index.html

I hope this can help you if you are looking for only to have your text file is available in memory.