New I/O and Text files

Question

Hi,
I've to read a text file by chunks of SIZE byte sequentially. Then, for each loaded chunk I should access its content line by line (separated by \n).
The first solution I made is to load the file line by line with a BufferedReader counting the number of characters loaded so far, forming in memory the chunk and using it. But I think that this is too slow and I don't know why but for SIZE value bigger than 100MB I got an OutOfMemoryExceptiom (I'm giving 1GB of RAM to JVM using -Xmx1024m). So actually I'm forced to use a SIZE value of 50MB or 80MB.
I think that I can improve the performance of this chunking process using the New I/O (probably fixing in this way also the OutOfMemory bug). But the problem is how to use that package to read a block of SIZE bytes into memory, convert them in chars and accessing them line by line.
I've tried something like:
ByteBuffer buff = ByteBuffer.allocate(SIZE);
int size = ch.read(buff);
char[] chars = buff.asCharBuffer().array(); // <- HERE THE PROBLEM
if (ch.position() != ch.size()) {
     int k = size - 1;
     char chrt = chars[k];
     while(chrt != '\n' && k >= 0) {
          ch.position(ch.position() - 1);
          chrt = chars[--k];
CharArrayReader chr = new CharArrayReader(chars);
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(chr);
But the problem with this code is that the .array() method gives me a UnsupportedOperationException.
As you can see by my code, another problem is the alignment of the last loaded string that can be "cutted" in the middle. So my idea was to walk back from the end of the loaded chunk of chars to the first new line (moving the current channel position). I don't know if it works or there is a better solution (I've the previous problem before!).
Any ideas/hints?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Forget all this and find a way to process the file line by line.