What is the fastest method for reading from a text file in Java?

Question

I currently use:

BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("filename"));

Is there a faster way?

Answer 1

While what you've got isn't necessarily the absolute fastest, it's simple. In fact, I wouldn't use quite that form - I'd use something which allows me to specify a charset, e.g.

// Why is there no method to give this guaranteed charset
// without "risk" of exceptions? Grr.
Charset utf8 = Charset.forName("UTF-8");     
BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(
                           new InputStreamReader(
                               new FileInputStream("filename"),
                               utf8));

You can probably make it go faster using NIO, but I wouldn't until I'd seen an actual problem. If you see a problem, but you're doing other things with the data, make sure they're not the problem first: write a program to just read the text of the file. Don't forget to do whatever it takes on your box to clear file system caches between runs though...