Java file issue

Question

Hi,
I wonder if someone could give me some advice as to how I will maintain the position in a file. I have a class which reads a file every five seconds. When the class first begins to read it can start at the beginning of the file. When it reads once I would like it to remeber the position in the file and when it is next called to read, it should start from that position. I have seen example of this with random access file using the seek methods so maybe I should use this?...I'm not sure. I would really appreciate if a simple example could be provided. I've included the main parts of my own code below.
Many thanks.
        File inputFile = new File("test.txt");
       //long marker = inputFile.length();
       //long endmarker;
       FileReader fwr = new FileReader(inputFile);
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(fwr);
        while ( (str = in.readLine()) != null) {
            //do stuff with the file
       }

Answer 1

Hi,
Ok I'm giving it a go trying to figure out the position in the file but I'm getting no where....Basically theres anohter class that arbitrarily updating this file (it could be updating every 1 or 2 seconds or not for 10 seconds). I want my parse code to read the file every five seconds but only read the new entries to the file.
So what i'm trying to say is that if this is the first time that the code is run, then start reading from the beginning of the file. If it's not then only read the new information.
So based on this logic, I've created a boolean called startOfFile and this should be set to true if the code hasnt been run before. If this is true then the file pointer is set to 0 otherwise its set to the file pointer position. This boolean is change after the first line is read. However while I am not getting any errors my code is still being read from the beginning of the file.
Any pointers appreciated,
Many thanks
public class parseClass extends Thread{
  Timer timer;
  int seconds;
  public parseClass(int seconds) {
    this.seconds = seconds;
    timer = new Timer();
    timer.schedule(new parseFile(),
                   0,        //initial delay
                   5*1000);  //subsequent rate
class parseFile extends TimerTask{
    public void run() {
      boolean startOfFile = true;
      try {
       File inputFile = new File("test.txt");
          RandomAccessFile in = new RandomAccessFile(inputFile, "r" );
        long Position;
        if (startOfFile != false){
          Position = 0;
        else{
          Position = in.getFilePointer();
        in.seek(Position);
    while ((str = in.readLine()) != null){
                //do stuff with the contents of the file.
          Position = in.getFilePointer();
          startOfFile=false;
        } //end of outer while loop
      catch (IOException e) {
  }