You can also use the split method of String:

String[] lines = myString.split(System.getProperty("line.separator"));

This gives you all lines in a handy array.

I don't know about the performance of split. It uses regular expressions.

The method lines() you are using already does what you expect it to do.

Java 8 has added a new method called lines() in Files class which can be used to read a file line by line in Java. The beauty of this method is that it reads all lines from a file as Stream of String, which is populated lazily as the stream is consumed. So, if you have a huge file and you only read first 100 lines then rest of the lines will not be loaded into memory, which results in better performance.

This is slightly different than Files.readAllLines() method (which reads all lines into a List) because this method reads the file lazily, only when a terminal operation is called on Stream e.g. forEach(), count() etc. By using count() method you can actually count a number of lines in files or number of empty lines by filtering empty lines.

Reference: https://javarevisited.blogspot.com/2015/07/3-ways-to-read-file-line-by-line-in.html

To add the Java 8 way to this question:

Arrays.stream(content.split("\\r?\\n")).forEach(line -> /*do something */)

Of curse you can also use System.lineSeparator()to split if you are sure that the file is comming from the same plattform as the vm runs on.

Or even better use the stream api even more agressiv with filter, map and collect:

String result = Arrays.stream(content.split(System.lineSeparator()))
                     .filter(/* filter for lines you are interested in*/)
                     .map(/*convert string*/)
                     .collect(Collectors.joining(";"));