Which is the best way to read the last line of a text file in Java?

Question

I was confused when I want to get the last line of a plain text file in Java. How can I do this? and which is the best way without using scanner?

Thanks

Answer 1

The simplest way to do it is simply to iterate over the lines in the file and stop when you reach the end. For example:

// I assume this is disposed properly etc
private static String getLastLine(BufferedReader reader) throws IOException {
    String line = null;
    String nextLine;
    while ((nextLine = reader.readLine()) != null) {
        line = nextLine;
    }
    return line;
}

This will return null for an empty reader.

Unless I knew I was going to have to read a really big file, that's what I'd do. Trying to do this by skipping straight to the last line is hard. Really hard, especially if you need a variable-width encoding such as UTF-8.