Comments on: Read a file into a byte array

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 10 May 2011 16:16:04 +0000

The loop should be enclosed in a try/finally. ie:

try { readloop } finally { is.close() } otherwise you will leave streams open if there is an error.

Also, for efficiency, you would normally want to wrap your FileInputStream with a BufferedInputStream.
use a

By: ricardoz

ricardoz — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:12:45 +0000

@Jake: from the FileInputStream javadoc

“Returns: the total number of bytes read into the buffer, or -1 if there is no more data because the end of the file has been reached.”

The problem you mention shouldn’t happen since after EOF is found read should always return -1.

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:32:33 +0000

What about the potential infinite loop if the stream encounters an EOF in the middle of the file and then numRead will continue to be set to 0 and hence will never increase the offset. and then we’ll cycle and cycle.

By: Shaun Hol

Shaun Hol — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 15:45:50 +0000

Sorry ignore that – The second param is the offset into the array, not the offset into the file itself.

By: Shaun Hol

Shaun Hol — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 14:21:37 +0000

Is there a bug here, or did I miss something ?
The bytes buffer address isn’t getting updated during iteratons of the loop.

By: ricardoz

ricardoz — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 17:43:39 +0000

@stronghead: The code reads any file as binary content, so it really doesn’t mind what’s inside of it. You probably have a problem somewhere else, post your code if you want.

By: Stronghead

Stronghead — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 06:54:04 +0000

But this code cannot read the doc file which has table in it.. Any help??