I am not aware of any library that has that functionality. However, a correct code for a external binary search in Java should be similar to this:
class ExternalBinarySearch {
final RandomAccessFile file;
final Comparator<String> test; // tests the element given as search parameter with the line. Insert a PrefixComparator here
public ExternalBinarySearch(File f, Comparator<String> test) throws FileNotFoundException {
this.file = new RandomAccessFile(f, "r");
this.test = test;
}
public String search(String element) throws IOException {
long l = file.length();
return search(element, -1, l-1);
}
/**
* Searches the given element in the range [low,high]. The low value of -1 is a special case to denote the beginning of a file.
* In contrast to every other line, a line at the beginning of a file doesn't need a \n directly before the line
*/
private String search(String element, long low, long high) throws IOException {
if(high - low < 1024) {
// search directly
long p = low;
while(p < high) {
String line = nextLine(p);
int r = test.compare(line,element);
if(r > 0) {
return null;
} else if (r < 0) {
p += line.length();
} else {
return line;
}
}
return null;
} else {
long m = low + ((high - low) / 2);
String line = nextLine(m);
int r = test.compare(line, element);
if(r > 0) {
return search(element, low, m);
} else if (r < 0) {
return search(element, m, high);
} else {
return line;
}
}
}
private String nextLine(long low) throws IOException {
if(low == -1) { // Beginning of file
file.seek(0);
} else {
file.seek(low);
}
int bufferLength = 65 * 1024;
byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferLength];
int r = file.read(buffer);
int lineBeginIndex = -1;
// search beginning of line
if(low == -1) { //beginning of file
lineBeginIndex = 0;
} else {
//normal mode
for(int i = 0; i < 1024; i++) {
if(buffer[i] == '\n') {
lineBeginIndex = i + 1;
break;
}
}
}
if(lineBeginIndex == -1) {
// no line begins within next 1024 bytes
return null;
}
int start = lineBeginIndex;
for(int i = start; i < r; i++) {
if(buffer[i] == '\n') {
// Found end of line
return new String(buffer, lineBeginIndex, i - lineBeginIndex + 1);
return line.toString();
}
}
throw new IllegalArgumentException("Line to long");
}
}
Please note: I made up this code ad-hoc: Corner cases are not tested nearly good enough, the code assumes that no single line is larger than 64K, etc.
I also think that building an index of the offsets where lines start might be a good idea. For a 500 GB file, that index should be stored in an index file. You should gain a not-so-small constant factor with that index because than there is no need to search for the next line in each step.
I know that was not the question, but building a prefix tree data structure like (Patrica) Tries (on disk/SSD) might be a good idea to do the prefix search.
