Get number of columns using OpenCSV

Question

I have a txt file and I want to count the number of columns. (I use openCSV)

public class demoTable {
    public demoTable(){
         read();
        JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, "number of columns inside file: " + getNumberOfColumnsFromFile(), null, JOptionPane.INFORMATION_MESSAGE);
    close();
    }

    private void read(){
    try {
        this.fileInputStream = new FileInputStream("D:\\Book3.txt");
        UTF8_CHARSET = StandardCharsets.UTF_8.newDecoder();
        UTF8_CHARSET.onMalformedInput(CodingErrorAction.REPLACE);
        this.fileReader = new InputStreamReader(this.fileInputStream, UTF8_CHARSET);
        this.reader = new CSVReader(this.fileReader, '\t');
    } 
    catch (FileNotFoundException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(VJTable.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
    }
    }

    private int getNumberOfColumnsFromFile(){
    //Estimating number of rows from file (Googled that).
    this.numberOfColumns = 0;
    try {
        while( (this.nextLine = this.reader.readNext()) != null){
            this.numberOfColumns++;
        }
    } 
    catch (IOException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(VJTable.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
    }
    return this.numberOfColumns;
   }

   private void close(){
    try {
        this.fileInputStream.close();
        this.fileReader.close();
        this.reader.close();
    }
    catch (IOException ex) {
        Logger.getLogger(VJTable.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
    }
    }
}

Unfortunately, the getNumberOfColumnsFromFile() method returns the number of rows instead of columns. Could you please tell me what I don't do well in here? Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The CSVRearder.readNext() method returns a String[], where each column/value is an element:

Reads the next line from the buffer and converts to a string array [..] with each comma-separated element as a separate entry.

Thus,

String[] header = this.reader.readNext(); // assuming first read
if (header != null) {                     // and there is a (header) line
   int columnCount = header.length;       // get the column count
}