stanfordnlp/CoreNLP · error · java.io.IOException

Number of pointers != size of short form

Error message

Number of pointers != size of short form

What it means

Alignment.loadPointers reads a whitespace-separated line of integer pointers and validates that its length equals shortForm.length before parsing. If the counts disagree, the file's pointer row does not correspond to the short form, and an IOException with this message is thrown rather than proceeding with a misaligned array.

Solutions

1. Check that the shortform file and pointers file are a matched pair from the same dataset release.
2. Re-download or regenerate the alignment data files to fix truncation/corruption.
3. Count the entries: the pointer line must contain exactly one integer per shortForm element; fix the data file accordingly.

// Pre-validate data file consistency
String[] lines = Files.readAllLines(Paths.get(pointersFile)).toArray(new String[0]);
int shortFormLen = shortForm.length;
int pointerCount = lines[0].trim().split("\\s+").length;
if (pointerCount != shortFormLen) throw new IllegalStateException("Mismatched alignment files");

try {
  Alignment a = new Alignment(reader, shortForm);
} catch (IOException e) {
  log.warning("Alignment data mismatch/corruption: " + e.getMessage());
  a = null; // fall back or abort
}

When it happens

Trigger: Loading a pascal alignment/shortform data file whose pointer-count line has fewer or more integers than the short form previously read (truncated file, wrong file pairing, hand-edited data).

Common situations: Passing mismatched file pair to Alignment (shortForm from one file, pointers from another), corrupted download of the alignment data, or editing the data file and dropping entries.

Understand the failure class

Background: "failed to read file", EACCES, ENOENT and "could not read <path>" errors: when a program can't read a file from disk — this error's family across 49 libraries.

Related errors

• : Entry has multiple types for : . Taking type to be
• argsToProperties could not read properties file: " + file
• Attempt to make ObjectBank with empty file list
• Attempt to open file with null name
• Bad line:

AI-assisted analysis of stanfordnlp/CoreNLP@1b7edd19c4 (2026-09-10). Data as JSON: /api/errors/31c99ad85a9d141f. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at src/edu/stanford/nlp/ie/pascal/Alignment.java:53

  public Alignment(BufferedReader reader) throws IOException {
    String line;
    line = reader.readLine();
    if (line == null) {
      throw new IOException();
    }
    longForm = line.toCharArray();
    line = reader.readLine();
    if (line == null) {
      throw new IOException();
    }
    shortForm = line.toCharArray();
    line = reader.readLine();
    if (line == null) {
      throw new IOException();
    }
    String[] pstrings = line.split("\\s+");
    if (pstrings.length != shortForm.length) {
      throw new IOException("Number of pointers != size of short form");
    }
    pointers = new int[pstrings.length];
    for (int i = 0; i < pointers.length; ++i) {
      pointers[i] = Integer.parseInt(pstrings[i]);
    }
  }

  public void print() {
    System.out.println(toString());
  }

  @Override
  public String toString() {
    return toString("");
  }

  private static final char[] spaces = "                      ".toCharArray();

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