How to compare large text files?

Question

I have a general question on your opinion about my "technique".

There are 2 textfiles (file_1 and file_2) that need to be compared to each other. Both are very huge (3-4 gigabytes, from 30,000,000 to 45,000,000 lines each). My idea is to read several lines (as many as possible) of file_1 to the memory, then compare those to all lines of file_2. If there's a match, the lines from both files that match shall be written to a new file. Then go on with the next 1000 lines of file_1 and also compare those to all lines of file_2 until I went through file_1 completely.

But this sounds actually really, really time consuming and complicated to me. Can you think of any other method to compare those two files?

How long do you think the comparison could take? For my program, time does not matter that much. I have no experience in working with such huge files, therefore I have no idea how long this might take. It shouldn't take more than a day though. ;-) But I am afraid my technique could take forever...

Antoher question that just came to my mind: how many lines would you read into the memory? As many as possible? Is there a way to determine the number of possible lines before actually trying it? I want to read as many as possible (because I think that's faster) but I've ran out of memory quite often.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT I think I have to explain my problem a bit more.

The purpose is not to see if the two files in general are identical (they are not). There are some lines in each file that share the same "characteristic". Here's an example: file_1 looks somewhat like this:

mat1 1000 2000 TEXT      //this means the range is from 1000 - 2000
mat1 2040 2050 TEXT
mat3 10000 10010 TEXT
mat2 20 500 TEXT

file_2looks like this:

mat3 10009 TEXT
mat3 200 TEXT
mat1 999 TEXT

TEXT refers to characters and digits that are of no interest for me, mat can go from mat1 - mat50 and are in no order; also there can be 1000x mat2 (but the numbers in the next column are different). I need to find the fitting lines in a way that: matX is the same in both compared lines an the number mentioned in file_2 fits into the range mentioned in file_1. So in my example I would find one match: line 3 of file_1and line 1 of file_2 (because both are mat3 and 10009 is between 10000 and 10010). I hope this makes it clear to you!

So my question is: how would you search for the matching lines?

Yes, I use Java as my programming language.

EDIT I now divided the huge files first so that I have no problems with being out of memory. I also think it is faster to compare (many) smaller files to each other than those two huge files. After that I can compare them the way I mentioned above. It may not be the perfect way, but I am still learning ;-) Nonentheless all your approaches were very helpful to me, thank you for your replies!

Answer 1

I think, your way is rather reasonable.

I can imagine different strategies -- for example, you can sort both files before compare (where is efficient implementation of filesort, and unix sort utility can sort several Gbs files in minutes), and, while sorted, you can compare files sequentally, reading line by line.

But this is rather complex way to go -- you need to run external program (sort), or write comparable efficient implementation of filesort in java by yourself -- which is by itself not an easy task. So, for the sake of simplicity, I think you way of chunked read is very promising;

As for how to find reasonable block -- first of all, it may not be correct what "the more -- the better" -- I think, time of all work will grow asymptotically, to some constant line. So, may be you'll be close to that line faster then you think -- you need benchmark for this.

Next -- you may read lines to buffer like this:

final List<String> lines = new ArrayList<>();
try{
    final List<String> block = new ArrayList<>(BLOCK_SIZE);
    for(int i=0;i<BLOCK_SIZE;i++){
       final String line = ...;//read line from file
       block.add(line);
    }
    lines.addAll(block); 
}catch(OutOfMemory ooe){
    //break
}

So you read as many lines, as you can -- leaving last BLOCK_SIZE of free memory. BLOCK_SIZE should be big enouth to the rest of you program to run without OOM

Answer 2

In an ideal world, you would be able to read in every line of file_2 into memory (probably using a fast lookup object like a HashSet, depending on your needs), then read in each line from file_1 one at a time and compare it to your data structure holding the lines from file_2.

As you have said you run out of memory however, I think a divide-and-conquer type strategy would be best. You could use the same method as I mentioned above, but read in a half (or a third, a quarter... depending on how much memory you can use) of the lines from file_2 and store them, then compare all of the lines in file_1. Then read in the next half/third/quarter/whatever into memory (replacing the old lines) and go through file_1 again. It means you have to go through file_1 more, but you have to work with your memory constraints.

---

EDIT: In response to the added detail in your question, I would change my answer in part. Instead of reading in all of file_2 (or in chunks) and reading in file_1 a line at a time, reverse that, as file_1 holds the data to check against.

Also, with regards searching the matching lines. I think the best way would be to do some processing on file_1. Create a HashMap<List<Range>> that maps a String ("mat1" - "mat50") to a list of Ranges (just a wrapper for a startOfRange int and an endOfRange int) and populate it with the data from file_1. Then write a function like (ignoring error checking)

boolean isInRange(String material, int value)
{
    List<Range> ranges = hashMapName.get(material);
    for (Range range : ranges)
    {
        if (value >= range.getStart() && value <= range.getEnd())
        {
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

and call it for each (parsed) line of file_2.