Java: Reading a file into an array

Here is some example code to help you get started:

package com.acme;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class FileArrayProvider {

    public String[] readLines(String filename) throws IOException {
        FileReader fileReader = new FileReader(filename);
        BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(fileReader);
        List<String> lines = new ArrayList<String>();
        String line = null;
        while ((line = bufferedReader.readLine()) != null) {
            lines.add(line);
        }
        bufferedReader.close();
        return lines.toArray(new String[lines.size()]);
    }
}

And an example unit test:

package com.acme;

import java.io.IOException;

import org.junit.Test;

public class FileArrayProviderTest {

    @Test
    public void testFileArrayProvider() throws IOException {
        FileArrayProvider fap = new FileArrayProvider();
        String[] lines = fap
                .readLines("src/main/java/com/acme/FileArrayProvider.java");
        for (String line : lines) {
            System.out.println(line);
        }
    }
}

Hope this helps.

import java.io.File;

import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Path;

import java.util.List;

// ...

Path filePath = new File("fileName").toPath();
Charset charset = Charset.defaultCharset();        
List<String> stringList = Files.readAllLines(filePath, charset);
String[] stringArray = stringList.toArray(new String[]{});

Apache Commons I/O provides FileUtils#readLines(), which should be fine for all but huge files: http://commons.apache.org/io/api-release/index.html. The 2.1 distribution includes FileUtils.lineIterator(), which would be suitable for large files. Google's Guava libraries include similar utilities.

For completeness, another way to read all lines of a file¹ as String[] is to use the Java 8+ BufferedReader.lines() method. Like this:

BufferedReader br ...
String[] lines = br.lines().toArray(String[]::new);

Note that since the lines() stream cannot tell the downstream methods how many lines there will be ahead of time, some temporary String arrays will need to be created. However, the implementation is designed to avoid unnecessary copying.

^{1 - You can use this approach with anything that you can wrap with a BufferedReader.}

You should be able to use forward slashes in Java to refer to file locations.

The BufferedReader class is used for wrapping other file readers whos read method may not be very efficient. A more detailed description can be found in the Java APIs.

Toolkit's use of BufferedReader is probably what you need.