Streaming Files

Hi all... I've been considering trying to a third-party program for a game I play... but I can't figure out how to read from a file. The game writes chat logs, but how would I read from them as they are written to...
e.g

Code:

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start game
start third-party program (my program) [tpp]
tpp reads from chat logs
game writes to chat logs
tpp reads only the new data from chat logs (HOW DO I DO THIS!)

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I'm not sure whether its possible, but I think it is, I just dont know how. Could be useful for other things too, but this is where I'm at. Sorry, dont have any code, because I hit this logic block while planning it out.

Thanks for any help in advance,
Singing Boyo

If you have control of the stream, then you could just use a pipe stream. Otherwise, I guess you could continously read/mark/reset the position on a separate thread.

read/mark/reset? any chance I could get an example? I dont have any way to get control of the stream as far as I know.

Hmm... one thing, what if I used a BufferedReader on a FileInputStream, and continuously called readLine() (or whatever it is, been using scanner lately) on it. In my opinion, that would ensure that I got the new lines as the came through.

Thanks for the help,
SB

this seems to work, but needs work on performance. Edit the test file manually, save, and see the console gets updated as well.

Code:

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import java.io.*;
public class Test {
  public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException{
    InputStream in = new FileInputStream("foo.bar");
    int c;   
    while(true){
      try{
        c = in.read();
        if(c==-1) continue;
        else System.out.print((char)c);
      }catch(IOException ex){}
    }
  }
}

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hmmmm seems that if I del some lines of text, it would only update lines after the current mark...

Well, the chat logs aren't having deleted content, so deleted lines shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks for the code, haven't tested it yet, but it looks like it'll work.