Modify a .txt file in Java

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.

if the file is just a few thousand lines you should be able to read the entire file in one read and convert that to a String.

You can use apache IOUtils which has method like the following.

public static String readFile(String filename) throws IOException {
    File file = new File(filename);
    int len = (int) file.length();
    byte[] bytes = new byte[len];
    FileInputStream fis = null;
    try {
        fis = new FileInputStream(file);
        assert len == fis.read(bytes);
    } catch (IOException e) {
        close(fis);
        throw e;
    }
    return new String(bytes, "UTF-8");
}

public static void writeFile(String filename, String text) throws IOException {
    FileOutputStream fos = null;
    try {
        fos = new FileOutputStream(filename);
        fos.write(text.getBytes("UTF-8"));
    } catch (IOException e) {
        close(fos);
        throw e;
    }
}

public static void close(Closeable closeable) {
    try {
        closeable.close();
    } catch(IOException ignored) {
    }
}