Android - getting from a Uri to an InputStream to a byte array?

Question

I'm trying to get from an Android Uri to a byte array.

I have the following code, but it keeps telling me that the byte array is 61 bytes long, even though the file is quite large - so I think it may be turning the Uri string into a byte array, rather than the file :(

  Log.d(LOG_TAG, "fileUriString = " + fileUriString);   Uri tempuri = Uri.parse(fileUriString);   InputStream is = cR.openInputStream(tempuri);   String str=is.toString();   byte[] b3=str.getBytes();   Log.d(LOG_TAG, "len of data is " + imageByteArray.length      + " bytes"); 

Please can someone help me work out what to do?

The output is "fileUriString = content://media/external/video/media/53" and "len of data is 61 bytes".

Thanks!

Answer 1

is.toString() will give you a String representation of the InputStream instance, not its content.

You need to read() bytes from the InputStream into your array. There's two read methods to do that, read() which reads a single byte at a time, and read(byte[] bytes) which reads bytes from the InputStream into the byte array you pass to it.

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Update: to read the bytes given that an InputStream does not have a length as such, you need to read the bytes until there is nothing left. I suggest creating a method for yourself something like this is a nice simple starting point (this is how I would do it in Java at least).

public byte[] readBytes(InputStream inputStream) throws IOException {   // this dynamically extends to take the bytes you read   ByteArrayOutputStream byteBuffer = new ByteArrayOutputStream();    // this is storage overwritten on each iteration with bytes   int bufferSize = 1024;   byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize];    // we need to know how may bytes were read to write them to the byteBuffer   int len = 0;   while ((len = inputStream.read(buffer)) != -1) {     byteBuffer.write(buffer, 0, len);   }    // and then we can return your byte array.   return byteBuffer.toByteArray(); }