Number of lines in a file in Java

Question

I use huge data files, sometimes I only need to know the number of lines in these files, usually I open them up and read them line by line until I reach the end of the file<

Answer 1

I know this is an old question, but the accepted solution didn't quite match what I needed it to do. So, I refined it to accept various line terminators (rather than just line feed) and to use a specified character encoding (rather than ISO-8859-n). All in one method (refactor as appropriate):

public static long getLinesCount(String fileName, String encodingName) throws IOException {
    long linesCount = 0;
    File file = new File(fileName);
    FileInputStream fileIn = new FileInputStream(file);
    try {
        Charset encoding = Charset.forName(encodingName);
        Reader fileReader = new InputStreamReader(fileIn, encoding);
        int bufferSize = 4096;
        Reader reader = new BufferedReader(fileReader, bufferSize);
        char[] buffer = new char[bufferSize];
        int prevChar = -1;
        int readCount = reader.read(buffer);
        while (readCount != -1) {
            for (int i = 0; i < readCount; i++) {
                int nextChar = buffer[i];
                switch (nextChar) {
                    case '\r': {
                        // The current line is terminated by a carriage return or by a carriage return immediately followed by a line feed.
                        linesCount++;
                        break;
                    }
                    case '\n': {
                        if (prevChar == '\r') {
                            // The current line is terminated by a carriage return immediately followed by a line feed.
                            // The line has already been counted.
                        } else {
                            // The current line is terminated by a line feed.
                            linesCount++;
                        }
                        break;
                    }
                }
                prevChar = nextChar;
            }
            readCount = reader.read(buffer);
        }
        if (prevCh != -1) {
            switch (prevCh) {
                case '\r':
                case '\n': {
                    // The last line is terminated by a line terminator.
                    // The last line has already been counted.
                    break;
                }
                default: {
                    // The last line is terminated by end-of-file.
                    linesCount++;
                }
            }
        }
    } finally {
        fileIn.close();
    }
    return linesCount;
}

This solution is comparable in speed to the accepted solution, about 4% slower in my tests (though timing tests in Java are notoriously unreliable).