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
}
}
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.