May the FileInputStream.available foolish me?

Posted by Tom Brito on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Tom Brito
Published on 2010-05-07T13:29:03Z Indexed on 2010/05/07 13:38 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 358

Filed under:
|

This FileInputStream.available() javadoc says:

Returns an estimate of the number of remaining bytes that can be read (or skipped over) from this input stream without blocking by the next invocation of a method for this input stream. The next invocation might be the same thread or another thread. A single read or skip of this many bytes will not block, but may read or skip fewer bytes.

In some cases, a non-blocking read (or skip) may appear to be blocked when it is merely slow, for example when reading large files over slow networks.

I'm not sure if in this check:

if (new FileInputStream(xmlFile).available() == 0)

can I rely that empty files will always return zero?

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about java

Related posts about file-io