Quickly read the last line of a text file?

Have a look at my answer to a similar question for C#. The code would be quite similar, although the encoding support is somewhat different in Java.

Basically it's not a terribly easy thing to do in general. As MSalter points out, UTF-8 does make it easy to spot \r or \n as the UTF-8 representation of those characters is just the same as ASCII, and those bytes won't occur in multi-byte character.

So basically, take a buffer of (say) 2K, and progressively read backwards (skip to 2K before you were before, read the next 2K) checking for a line termination. Then skip to exactly the right place in the stream, create an InputStreamReader on the top, and a BufferedReader on top of that. Then just call BufferedReader.readLine().

Using FileReader or FileInputStream won't work - you'll have to use either FileChannel or RandomAccessFile to loop through the file backwards from the end. Encodings will be a problem though, as Jon said.

as far as I know The fastest way to read the last line of a text file is using FileUtils Apache class which is in "org.apache.commons.io". I have a two-million-line file and by using this class, it took me less than one second to find the last line. Here is the my code:

LineIterator lineIterator = FileUtils.lineIterator(newFile(filePath),"UTF-8");
String lastLine="";
while (lineIterator.hasNext()){
 lastLine=  lineIterator.nextLine();
}

In C#, you should be able to set the stream's position:

From: http://bytes.com/groups/net-c/269090-streamreader-read-last-line-text-file

using(FileStream fs = File.OpenRead("c:\\file.dat"))
{
    using(StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(fs))
    {
        sr.BaseStream.Position = fs.Length - 4;
        if(sr.ReadToEnd() == "DONE")
            // match
    }
}

To avoid the Unicode problems related to reverting the string (or the StringBuilder), as discussed in Eric Leschinski excellent answer, one can read to a byte list, from the end of the file, revert it to a byte array and then create the String from the byte array.

Below are the changes to Eric Leschinski answer's code, to do it with a byte array. The code changes are below the commented lines of code:

static public String tail2(File file, int lines) {
    java.io.RandomAccessFile fileHandler = null;
    try {
        fileHandler = new java.io.RandomAccessFile( file, "r" );
        long fileLength = fileHandler.length() - 1;
        //StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        List<Byte> sb = new ArrayList<>();
        int line = 0;

        for(long filePointer = fileLength; filePointer != -1; filePointer--){
            fileHandler.seek( filePointer );
            int readByte = fileHandler.readByte();

            if( readByte == 0xA ) {
                if (filePointer < fileLength) {
                    line = line + 1;
                }
            } else if( readByte == 0xD ) {
                if (filePointer < fileLength-1) {
                    line = line + 1;
                }
            }
            if (line >= lines) {
                break;
            }
            //sb.add( (char) readByte );
            sb.add( (byte) readByte );
        }

        //String lastLine = sb.reverse().toString();
        //Revert byte array and create String
        byte[] bytes = new byte[sb.size()];
        for (int i=0; i<sb.size(); i++) bytes[sb.size()-1-i] = sb.get(i);
        String lastLine = new String(bytes);
        return lastLine;
    } catch( java.io.FileNotFoundException e ) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return null;
    } catch( java.io.IOException e ) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return null;
    }
    finally {
        if (fileHandler != null )
            try {
                fileHandler.close();
            } catch (IOException e) {
            }
    }
}