Array sizing issue

Does anyone know how i can set the size of a character array to the size of a file? The length method in the File class returns a long value representing the number of bytes in the file. So this declaration long[] c = new long[file.length()]; would be the right size when reading Unicode characters that are encoded using UTF-8 but reading the characters that are represented using multiple bytes in UTF-8 would throw an ArrayIndexOutBounds Exception.

Daok whipped up this block of code to do the task but there must be a better way. Any ideas? Thanks.

Code:

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public static int getFileCharCount(String file) throws IOException{
   
    BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file));
    String lineOnebyOne = null;
    String finalText = null;
    int numberOfChar = 0;

    while ((lineOnebyOne = br.readLine ())!= null){
      finalText += lineOnebyOne;
      numberOfChar = finalText.length();
      br.close();
    }
    return numberOfChar;
  }

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