BufferedReader for large ByteBuffer?
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20-08-2019 - |
Question
Is there a way to read a ByteBuffer with a BufferedReader without having to turn it into a String first? I want to read through a fairly large ByteBuffer as lines of text and for performance reasons I want to avoid writing it to the disk. Calling toString on the ByteBuffer doesn't work because the resulting String is too large (it throws java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space). I would have thought there would be something in the API to wrap a ByteBuffer in a suitable reader, but I can't seem to find anything suitable.
Here's an abbreviated code sample the illustrates what I am doing):
// input stream is from Process getInputStream()
public String read(InputStream istream)
{
ReadableByteChannel source = Channels.newChannel(istream);
ByteArrayOutputStream ostream = new ByteArrayOutputStream(bufferSize);
WritableByteChannel destination = Channels.newChannel(ostream);
ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.allocateDirect(writeBufferSize);
while (source.read(buffer) != -1)
{
buffer.flip();
while (buffer.hasRemaining())
{
destination.write(buffer);
}
buffer.clear();
}
// this data can be up to 150 MB.. won't fit in a String.
result = ostream.toString();
source.close();
destination.close();
return result;
}
// after the process is run, we call this method with the String
public void readLines(String text)
{
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new StringReader(text));
String line;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null)
{
// do stuff with line
}
}
Solution
It's not clear why you're using a byte buffer to start with. If you've got an InputStream
and you want to read lines for it, why don't you just use an InputStreamReader
wrapped in a BufferedReader
? What's the benefit in getting NIO involved?
Calling toString()
on a ByteArrayOutputStream
sounds like a bad idea to me even if you had the space for it: better to get it as a byte array and wrap it in a ByteArrayInputStream
and then an InputStreamReader
, if you really have to have a ByteArrayOutputStream
. If you really want to call toString()
, at least use the overload which takes the name of the character encoding to use - otherwise it'll use the system default, which probably isn't what you want.
EDIT: Okay, so you really want to use NIO. You're still writing to a ByteArrayOutputStream
eventually, so you'll end up with a BAOS with the data in it. If you want to avoid making a copy of that data, you'll need to derive from ByteArrayOutputStream
, for instance like this:
public class ReadableByteArrayOutputStream extends ByteArrayOutputStream
{
/**
* Converts the data in the current stream into a ByteArrayInputStream.
* The resulting stream wraps the existing byte array directly;
* further writes to this output stream will result in unpredictable
* behavior.
*/
public InputStream toInputStream()
{
return new ByteArrayInputStream(array, 0, count);
}
}
Then you can create the input stream, wrap it in an InputStreamReader
, wrap that in a BufferedReader
, and you're away.
OTHER TIPS
You can use NIO, but there's no real need here. As Jon Skeet suggested:
public byte[] read(InputStream istream)
{
ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024]; // Experiment with this value
int bytesRead;
while ((bytesRead = istream.read(buffer)) != -1)
{
baos.write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
}
return baos.toByteArray();
}
// after the process is run, we call this method with the String
public void readLines(byte[] data)
{
BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new ByteArrayInputStream(data)));
String line;
while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null)
{
// do stuff with line
}
}
This is a sample:
public class ByteBufferBackedInputStream extends InputStream {
ByteBuffer buf;
public ByteBufferBackedInputStream(ByteBuffer buf) {
this.buf = buf;
}
public synchronized int read() throws IOException {
if (!buf.hasRemaining()) {
return -1;
}
return buf.get() & 0xFF;
}
@Override
public int available() throws IOException {
return buf.remaining();
}
public synchronized int read(byte[] bytes, int off, int len) throws IOException {
if (!buf.hasRemaining()) {
return -1;
}
len = Math.min(len, buf.remaining());
buf.get(bytes, off, len);
return len;
}
}
And you can use it like this:
String text = "this is text"; // It can be Unicode text
ByteBuffer buffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(text.getBytes("UTF-8"));
InputStream is = new ByteBufferBackedInputStream(buffer);
InputStreamReader r = new InputStreamReader(is, "UTF-8");
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(r);