CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javaandroidarraysstringbyte
Johann
Johann

Reputation: 29877

Convert byte array to string with equivalent number of bytes

Is it possible to convert a byte array to a string but where the length of the string is exactly the same length as the number of bytes in the array? If I use the following:

byte[] data; // Fill it with data
data.toString();

The length of the string is different than the length of the array. I believe that this is because Java and/or Android takes some kind of default encoding into account. The values in the array can be negative as well. Theoretically it should be possible to convert any byte to some character. I guess I need to figure out how to specify an encoding that generates a fixed single byte width for each character.

EDIT:

I tried the following but it didn't work:

byte[] textArray; // Fill this with some text.
String textString = new String(textArray, "ASCII"); 
textArray = textString.getBytes("ASCII"); // textArray ends up with different data.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2130

Answers (3)

OnePunchMan
OnePunchMan

Reputation: 748

This should work fine!

public static byte[] stringToByteArray(String pStringValue){
    int length= pStringValue.length();
    byte[] bytes = new byte[length];

    for(int index=0; index<length; index++){
        char ch= pStringValue.charAt(index);
        bytes[index]= (byte)ch;
    }

    return bytes;
}

since JDK 1.6:

You can also use:

stringValue.getBytes() which will return you a byte array.

In case of passing a NULL string, you need to handle that by either throwing the nullPointerException or handling it inside the method itself.

Upvotes: 0

Peter Elliott
Peter Elliott

Reputation: 3322

Try your code sample with US-ASCII or ISO-8859-1 in place of ASCII. ASCII is not a built-in Character encoding for Java or Android, but one of those two are. They are guaranteed single-byte encodings, with a caveat that characters not in the character set will be silently truncated.

Upvotes: 0

muhoweb
muhoweb

Reputation: 116

You can use the String constructor String(byte[] data) to create a string from the byte array. If you want to specify the charset as well, you can use String(byte[] data, Charset charset) constructor.

Upvotes: 1

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