Question

We’re streaming a CSV file from a web service. It appears that we’re losing the new line characters when streaming – the client gets the file all on a single line. Any idea what we’re doing wrong?

Code:

 public static void writeFile(OutputStream out, File file) throws IOException {
    BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file)); //File input stream 
    String line;
    while ((line = input.readLine()) != null) { //Read file
        out.write(line.getBytes());  //Write to output stream 
        out.flush();
    }
    input.close();
} 

Answer 1

Don’t use BufferedReader. You already have an OutputStream at hands, so just get an InputStream of the file and pipe the bytes from input to output it the usual Java IO way. This way you also don’t need to worry about newlines being eaten by BufferedReader:

public static void writeFile(OutputStream output, File file) throws IOException {
    InputStream input = null;
    byte[] buffer = new byte[10240]; // 10KB.
    try {
        input = new FileInputStream(file);
        for (int length = 0; (length = input.read(buffer)) > 0;) {
            output.write(buffer, 0, length);
        }
    } finally {
        if (input != null) try { input.close(); } catch (IOException logOrIgnore) {}
    }
}

Using a Reader/Writer would involve character encoding problems if you don’t know/specify the encoding beforehand. You actually also don’t need to know about them here. So just leave it aside.

To improve performance a bit more, you can always wrap the InputStream and OutputStream in an BufferedInputStream and BufferedOutputStream respectively.