BufferedReader for large ByteBuffer?

Question

Is there a way to read a ByteBuffer with a BufferedReader without having to turn it into a String first? I want to read through a fairly large ByteBuffer as lines of text an

Answer 1

It's not clear why you're using a byte buffer to start with. If you've got an InputStream and you want to read lines for it, why don't you just use an InputStreamReader wrapped in a BufferedReader? What's the benefit in getting NIO involved?

Calling toString() on a ByteArrayOutputStream sounds like a bad idea to me even if you had the space for it: better to get it as a byte array and wrap it in a ByteArrayInputStream and then an InputStreamReader, if you really have to have a ByteArrayOutputStream. If you really want to call toString(), at least use the overload which takes the name of the character encoding to use - otherwise it'll use the system default, which probably isn't what you want.

EDIT: Okay, so you really want to use NIO. You're still writing to a ByteArrayOutputStream eventually, so you'll end up with a BAOS with the data in it. If you want to avoid making a copy of that data, you'll need to derive from ByteArrayOutputStream, for instance like this:

public class ReadableByteArrayOutputStream extends ByteArrayOutputStream
{
    /**
     * Converts the data in the current stream into a ByteArrayInputStream.
     * The resulting stream wraps the existing byte array directly;
     * further writes to this output stream will result in unpredictable
     * behavior.
     */
    public InputStream toInputStream()
    {
        return new ByteArrayInputStream(array, 0, count);
    }
}

Then you can create the input stream, wrap it in an InputStreamReader, wrap that in a BufferedReader, and you're away.