Reading file contents into String

Added by Kees de Kooter, last edited by Kees de Kooter on Feb 21, 2006  (view change)

About three times a year I have to accomplish the seemingly easy task of reading the contents of a file into a String. Apparently the Sun folks did not find it necessary to create an API for this. So this piece of obscure code is the best I can come up with. There should be a more elegant way to do this.

private String readFile(String fileName) {
    
    File file = new File(fileName);
    
    char[] buffer = null;
    
    try {
        BufferedReader bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(
                new FileReader(file));

        buffer = new char[(int)file.length()];

        int i = 0;
        int c = bufferedReader.read();

        while (c != -1) {
            buffer[i++] = (char)c;
            c = bufferedReader.read();
        }
    } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
        log.error(e.getMessage());
    } catch (IOException e) {
        log.error(e.getMessage());
    }

    return new String(buffer);
}

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