A String is stored as an array of Unicode characters in Java. To convert it to a byte array, we translate the sequence of characters into a sequence of bytes. For this translation, we use an instance of Charset. This class specifies a mapping between a sequence of chars and a sequence of bytes.
String class has getBytes() method which can be used to convert String to byte array in Java. getBytes()- Encodes this String into a sequence of bytes using the platform's default charset, storing the result into a new byte array.
The simplest way to do so is using parseByte() method of Byte class in java.
Convert from String to byte[]:
String s = "some text here";
byte[] b = s.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
Convert from byte[] to String:
byte[] b = {(byte) 99, (byte)97, (byte)116};
String s = new String(b, StandardCharsets.US_ASCII);
You should, of course, use the correct encoding name. My examples used US-ASCII and UTF-8, the two most common encodings.
Here's a solution that avoids performing the Charset lookup for every conversion:
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
private final Charset UTF8_CHARSET = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
String decodeUTF8(byte[] bytes) {
return new String(bytes, UTF8_CHARSET);
}
byte[] encodeUTF8(String string) {
return string.getBytes(UTF8_CHARSET);
}
String original = "hello world";
byte[] utf8Bytes = original.getBytes("UTF-8");
You can convert directly via the String(byte[], String) constructor and getBytes(String) method. Java exposes available character sets via the Charset class. The JDK documentation lists supported encodings.
90% of the time, such conversions are performed on streams, so you'd use the Reader/Writer classes. You would not incrementally decode using the String methods on arbitrary byte streams - you would leave yourself open to bugs involving multibyte characters.
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