How to read a specific line using the specific line number from a file in Java?

Unless you have previous knowledge about the lines in the file, there's no way to directly access the 32nd line without reading the 31 previous lines.

That's true for all languages and all modern file systems.

So effectively you'll simply read lines until you've found the 32nd one.

Not that I know of, but what you could do is loop through the first 31 lines doing nothing using the readline() function of BufferedReader

FileInputStream fs= new FileInputStream("someFile.txt");
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(fs));
for(int i = 0; i < 31; ++i)
  br.readLine();
String lineIWant = br.readLine();

Joachim is right on, of course, and an alternate implementation to Chris' (for small files only because it loads the entire file) might be to use commons-io from Apache (though arguably you might not want to introduce a new dependency just for this, if you find it useful for other stuff too though, it could make sense).

For example:

String line32 = (String) FileUtils.readLines(file).get(31);

http://commons.apache.org/io/api-release/org/apache/commons/io/FileUtils.html#readLines(java.io.File, java.lang.String)

No, unless in that file format the line lengths are pre-determined (e.g. all lines with a fixed length), you'll have to iterate line by line to count them.

If you are talking about a text file, then there is really no way to do this without reading all the lines that precede it - After all, lines are determined by the presence of a newline, so it has to be read.

Use a stream that supports readline, and just read the first X-1 lines and dump the results, then process the next one.

EASY WAY - Reading a line using line number. Let's say Line number starts from 1 till null .

public class TextFileAssignmentOct {
    
    private void readData(int rowNum, BufferedReader br) throws IOException {
        int n=1;                                    //Line number starts from 1
        String row;
        while((row=br.readLine()) != null)  {       // Reads every line
            if (n == rowNum) {                      // When Line number matches with which you want to read
                System.out.println(row);
            }
            n++;                                    //This increments Line number
        }
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        File f = new File("../JavaPractice/FileRead.txt");
        FileReader fr = new FileReader(f);
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(fr);
        
        TextFileAssignmentOct txf = new TextFileAssignmentOct();
        txf.readData(4, br);    //Read a Specific Line using Line number and Passing buffered reader
    }
}