Number of lines in a file in Java

This is the fastest version I have found so far, about 6 times faster than readLines. On a 150MB log file this takes 0.35 seconds, versus 2.40 seconds when using readLines(). Just for fun, linux' wc -l command takes 0.15 seconds.

public static int countLinesOld(String filename) throws IOException {
    InputStream is = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(filename));
    try {
        byte[] c = new byte[1024];
        int count = 0;
        int readChars = 0;
        boolean empty = true;
        while ((readChars = is.read(c)) != -1) {
            empty = false;
            for (int i = 0; i < readChars; ++i) {
                if (c[i] == '\n') {
                    ++count;
                }
            }
        }
        return (count == 0 && !empty) ? 1 : count;
    } finally {
        is.close();
    }
}

EDIT, 9 1/2 years later: I have practically no java experience, but anyways I have tried to benchmark this code against the LineNumberReader solution below since it bothered me that nobody did it. It seems that especially for large files my solution is faster. Although it seems to take a few runs until the optimizer does a decent job. I've played a bit with the code, and have produced a new version that is consistently fastest:

public static int countLinesNew(String filename) throws IOException {
    InputStream is = new BufferedInputStream(new FileInputStream(filename));
    try {
        byte[] c = new byte[1024];

        int readChars = is.read(c);
        if (readChars == -1) {
            // bail out if nothing to read
            return 0;
        }

        // make it easy for the optimizer to tune this loop
        int count = 0;
        while (readChars == 1024) {
            for (int i=0; i<1024;) {
                if (c[i++] == '\n') {
                    ++count;
                }
            }
            readChars = is.read(c);
        }

        // count remaining characters
        while (readChars != -1) {
            System.out.println(readChars);
            for (int i=0; i<readChars; ++i) {
                if (c[i] == '\n') {
                    ++count;
                }
            }
            readChars = is.read(c);
        }

        return count == 0 ? 1 : count;
    } finally {
        is.close();
    }
}

Benchmark resuls for a 1.3GB text file, y axis in seconds. I've performed 100 runs with the same file, and measured each run with System.nanoTime(). You can see that countLinesOld has a few outliers, and countLinesNew has none and while it's only a bit faster, the difference is statistically significant. LineNumberReader is clearly slower.

I tested the above methods for counting lines and here are my observations for Different methods as tested on my system

File Size : 1.6 Gb Methods:

1. Using Scanner : 35s approx
2. Using BufferedReader : 5s approx
3. Using Java 8 : 5s approx
4. Using LineNumberReader : 5s approx

Moreover Java8 Approach seems quite handy :

Files.lines(Paths.get(filePath), Charset.defaultCharset()).count()
[Return type : long]

It seems that there are a few different approaches you can take with LineNumberReader.

I did this:

int lines = 0;

FileReader input = new FileReader(fileLocation);
LineNumberReader count = new LineNumberReader(input);

String line = count.readLine();

if(count.ready())
{
    while(line != null) {
        lines = count.getLineNumber();
        line = count.readLine();
    }
    
    lines+=1;
}
    
count.close();

System.out.println(lines);

Even more simply, you can use the Java BufferedReader lines() Method to return a stream of the elements, and then use the Stream count() method to count all of the elements. Then simply add one to the output to get the number of rows in the text file.

As example:

FileReader input = new FileReader(fileLocation);
LineNumberReader count = new LineNumberReader(input);

int lines = (int)count.lines().count() + 1;
    
count.close();

System.out.println(lines);

On Unix-based systems, use the wc command on the command-line.

Only way to know how many lines there are in file is to count them. You can of course create a metric from your data giving you an average length of one line and then get the file size and divide that with avg. length but that won't be accurate.

If you don't have any index structures, you'll not get around the reading of the complete file. But you can optimize it by avoiding to read it line by line and use a regex to match all line terminators.

Best Optimized code for multi line files having no newline('\n') character at EOF.

/**
 * 
 * @param filename
 * @return
 * @throws IOException
 */
public static int countLines(String filename) throws IOException {
    int count = 0;
    boolean empty = true;
    FileInputStream fis = null;
    InputStream is = null;
    try {
        fis = new FileInputStream(filename);
        is = new BufferedInputStream(fis);
        byte[] c = new byte[1024];
        int readChars = 0;
        boolean isLine = false;
        while ((readChars = is.read(c)) != -1) {
            empty = false;
            for (int i = 0; i < readChars; ++i) {
                if ( c[i] == '\n' ) {
                    isLine = false;
                    ++count;
                }else if(!isLine && c[i] != '\n' && c[i] != '\r'){   //Case to handle line count where no New Line character present at EOF
                    isLine = true;
                }
            }
        }
        if(isLine){
            ++count;
        }
    }catch(IOException e){
        e.printStackTrace();
    }finally {
        if(is != null){
            is.close();    
        }
        if(fis != null){
            fis.close();    
        }
    }
    LOG.info("count: "+count);
    return (count == 0 && !empty) ? 1 : count;
}

Scanner with regex:

public int getLineCount() {
    Scanner fileScanner = null;
    int lineCount = 0;
    Pattern lineEndPattern = Pattern.compile("(?m)$");  
    try {
        fileScanner = new Scanner(new File(filename)).useDelimiter(lineEndPattern);
        while (fileScanner.hasNext()) {
            fileScanner.next();
            ++lineCount;
        }   
    }catch(FileNotFoundException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return lineCount;
    }
    fileScanner.close();
    return lineCount;
}

Haven't clocked it.

if you use this

public int countLines(String filename) throws IOException {
    LineNumberReader reader  = new LineNumberReader(new FileReader(filename));
    int cnt = 0;
    String lineRead = "";
    while ((lineRead = reader.readLine()) != null) {}

    cnt = reader.getLineNumber(); 
    reader.close();
    return cnt;
}

you cant run to big num rows, likes 100K rows, because return from reader.getLineNumber is int. you need long type of data to process maximum rows..