Java NIO - How to efficiently parse a file containing both ascii and binary data?

Question

I have some data files looking something like this:

text
header
"lots of binary data hear"
/header
more text
header
"more binary data"
/header
....

Most of the files are around 1-5MB in size. It's very unlikely that I will have to deal with any files larger than approximately 30MB.

I'm fairly new to Java NIO and the API looks a bit like a jungle to me. Could anyone give me any pointers to how I should go about parsing a file like this?

Would it be possible to have multiple threads consuming data from different parts of the file? The file will just be open for reading.

Answer 1

you can FileChannel.map(), and read it like an array.

Answer 2

Redesign the file. That's a terrible design.

Answer 3

Question is how would you know if you're reading text or binary data. If there is a clear demarcation of the text and binary regions (like a marker, or a defined block size), then I suspect Preon would be able to help you out. Preon does have support for reading both text and binary data in a useful way. And since I'm pretty sure your binary data represents something else, you might also be able to decode the binary bits into a more useful data structure than just an array.