Cant find the newline character in a file (java)

Question

I am trying to get the last line of a file, but my output shows that it never finds it. I also tried looking for "[" which all the lines start with, but unless the jumps were perfect the program will not skip "[". I tried looking for "\r\n", System.getProperty("line.separator"), \r and \n. Most probably its a dumb mistake, but if I had it and I couldn't find it, then someone else may run into it too.

        RandomAccessFile raf = new RandomAccessFile(fileLocation, "r");
        //Finds the end of the file, and takes a little more
        long lastSegment = raf.length() - 5;
        //**Looks for the new line character \n?**
        //if it cant find it then take 5 more and look again.
        while(stringBuffer.lastIndexOf("\n") == -1)  {
            lastSegment = lastSegment-5;
            raf.seek(lastSegment);
            //Not sure this is the best way to do it
            String seen = raf.readLine();
            stringBuffer.append(seen);
        }
        //Trying to debug it and understand
        int location = stringBuffer.lastIndexOf("\n");
        System.out.println(location);
        FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(fileLocation);
        InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(fis, "UTF8");
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(isr);
        br.skip(lastSegment);
        System.out.println("br.readLine() " + br.readLine());
}

The idea from the code comes from Quickly read the last line of a text file?

The file I use is this http://www.4shared.com/file/i4rXwEXz/file.html

Thanks for the help, and if you see any other places where my code could be improve let me know

YMomb · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-24T06:20:00.323

It is just because you are using readline. It returns you the line String without the newline character whatever it was (CR/LF/CRLF).

The Javadoc or RandomAccessFile#readLine() says:

A line of text is terminated by a carriage-return character ('\r'), a newline character ('\n'), a carriage-return character immediately followed by a newline character, or the end of the file. Line-terminating characters are discarded and are not included as part of the string returned.

If you try to find the last line, you can read you file until its end.

Cant find the newline character in a file (java)

1 Answers1