Partial backport of Olof's file handling changes made in the main 1.7.x branch. Reworked a bit to use older file handling methods which don't require Java 1.7.

Main change is that files as a whole are read into (and written from) an array of bytes, which is converted to/from UTF-8 encoded text. Previously files were read line-by-line as text from a BufferedReader.

Surprisingly, this seems to vastly speed up startup time. I tested on a ~2 MB data set which is now loading in just over 1 second where it was previously loading in ~95 seconds.

src/com/massivecraft/factions/zcore/util/DiscUtil.java

@@ -7,27 +7,54 @@ import java.nio.channels.ReadableByteChannel;
 
 public class DiscUtil
 {
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	// CONSTANTS
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	
+	private final static String UTF8 = "UTF-8";
+	
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	// BYTE 
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	
+	public static byte[] readBytes(File file) throws IOException
+	{
+		int length = (int) file.length();
+		byte[] output = new byte[length];
+		InputStream in = new FileInputStream(file);
+		int offset = 0;
+		while (offset < length)
+		{
+			offset += in.read(output, offset, (length - offset));
+		}
+		in.close();
+		return output;
+	}
+	
+	public static void writeBytes(File file, byte[] bytes) throws IOException
+	{
+		FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(file);
+		out.write(bytes);
+		out.close();
+	}
+
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	// STRING
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	
 	public static void write(File file, String content) throws IOException
 	{
-		BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(new FileOutputStream(file, false), "UTF8"));
+		writeBytes(file, utf8(content));
-		out.write(content);
-		out.close();
 	}
 	
 	public static String read(File file) throws IOException
 	{
-		BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(file), "UTF-8"));
+		return utf8(readBytes(file));
-		String ret = new String(new byte[0], "UTF-8");
-		 
-		String line;
-		while ((line = in.readLine()) != null)
-		{
-			ret += line;
 	}
 	
-		in.close();
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
-		return ret;
+	// CATCH
-	}
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
 	
 	public static boolean writeCatch(File file, String content)
 	{
@@ -54,6 +81,10 @@ public class DiscUtil
 		}
 	}
 	
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	// DOWNLOAD
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	
 	public static boolean downloadUrl(String urlstring, File file)
 	{
 		try
@@ -75,4 +106,53 @@ public class DiscUtil
 	{
 		return downloadUrl(urlstring, new File(filename));
 	}
+	
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	// FILE DELETION
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	
+    public static boolean deleteRecursive(File path) throws FileNotFoundException
+    {
+        if ( ! path.exists()) throw new FileNotFoundException(path.getAbsolutePath());
+        boolean ret = true;
+        if (path.isDirectory())
+        {
+            for (File f : path.listFiles())
+            {
+                ret = ret && deleteRecursive(f);
+            }
+        }
+        return ret && path.delete();
+    }
+    
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+	// UTF8 ENCODE AND DECODE
+	// -------------------------------------------- //
+    
+	public static byte[] utf8(String string)
+	{
+	    try
+		{
+			return string.getBytes(UTF8);
+		}
+		catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e)
+		{
+			e.printStackTrace();
+			return null;
+		}
+	}
+    
+	public static String utf8(byte[] bytes)
+	{
+	    try
+		{
+			return new String(bytes, UTF8);
+		}
+		catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e)
+		{
+			e.printStackTrace();
+			return null;
+		}
+	}
+
 }