Not reading the first line from a text file

Question

I have crated this method to read data from a text file. I am storing all the data which i recive from the BufferedReader inside a String array. Now when you want to read a specific data you have to pass the line number as argument to the method. The problem is i am getting data from line 2 but not able to get data from line 1. I am attaching the screen shot of the text file from where i am trying to read the data.

 public String read(int num) throws IOException{
       String readdata;
       String[] data1=new String[20];
       try {
        FileReader read = new FileReader("E:\\TextFile.txt");
        BufferedReader data = new BufferedReader(read);

        while(data.readLine() != null){
            for(int i=0; i<data1.length;i++){
                data1[i]=data.readLine();
                if(data1[i] == null){
                break;
                }//if
            }//for
        }//while
    }//try
    catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }//catch
    finally{
        data.close();
    }//finally

    readdata=data1[num];
    return readdata;
    }//read

Answer 1

You are skipping the line :

      while(data.readLine() != null){ // --> reading here
        for(int i=0; i<data1.length;i++){
            data1[i]=data.readLine();   //--> and here

Answer 2

You need to change your while loop

String str="";
while((str=data.readLine()) != null){ // read the line
    for(int i=0; i<data1.length;i++){
        data1[i]=str; // and reuse it
        if(data1[i] == null){
           break;
          }
      }
 }

What is the issue in your code? you are skipping first line.

  while(data.readLine() != null){ // already reads first line here
        for(int i=0; i<data1.length;i++){
            data1[i]=data.readLine(); // now you are reading from 2nd line
            if(data1[i] == null){
            break;
            }
        }
    }

Answer 3

You are in deed skipping the first line with the first data.readLine() call.

You can simplify your loop like this:

for (int i = 0; i < data1.length && ((readData = data.readLine()) != null); i++) {
    data1[i] = readData;
}

Answer 4

You can try this to avoid reading twice at the beginning:

  String aux = data.readLine();
  while(aux != null){
    for(int i=0; i<data1.length;i++){
        data1[i] = aux;

Hope it helps.

Clemencio Morales Lucas.

Answer 5

this might be a late response but may be it can help someone.

As per the steps followed in your code, you can try this as a solution:

int i=0;
while(data.ready()){
  data1[i++] = data.readLine();
}

the ready() function will tell us whether the stream is available for reading. A buffered character stream is ready if the buffer is not empty, or if the underlying character stream is ready.

Hope that helps :)