Modify a .txt file in Java

Question

I have a text file that I want to edit using Java. It has many thousands of lines. I basically want to iterate through the lines and change/edit/delete some text. This will need to happen quite often.

From the solutions I saw on other sites, the general approach seems to be:

• Open the existing file using a BufferedReader
• Read each line, make modifications to each line, and add it to a StringBuilder
• Once all the text has been read and modified, write the contents of the StringBuilder to a new file
• Replace the old file with the new file

This solution seems slightly "hacky" to me, especially if I have thousands of lines in my text file.

Anybody know of a better solution?

Answer 1

I haven't done this in Java recently, but writing an entire file into memory seems like a bad idea.

The best idea that I can come up with is open a temporary file in writing mode at the same time, and for each line, read it, modify if necessary, then write into the temporary file. At the end, delete the original and rename the temporary file.

If you have modify permissions on the file system, you probably also have deleting and renaming permissions.