Idiomatic way to convert an InputStream to a String in Scala

Question

I have a handy function that I've used in Java for converting an InputStream to a String. Here is a direct translation to Scala:

  def inputStreamToString(is: InputStream) = {
    val rd: BufferedReader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is, "UTF-8")) 
    val builder = new StringBuilder()    
    try {
      var line = rd.readLine 
      while (line != null) { 
        builder.append(line + "\n")
        line = rd.readLine
      }
    } finally {
      rd.close
    }
    builder.toString
  }

Is there an idiomatic way to do this in scala?

Answer 1

For Scala >= 2.11

scala.io.Source.fromInputStream(is).mkString

For Scala < 2.11:

scala.io.Source.fromInputStream(is).getLines().mkString("\n")

does pretty much the same thing. Not sure why you want to get lines and then glue them all back together, though. If you can assume the stream's nonblocking, you could just use .available, read the whole thing into a byte array, and create a string from that directly.

Answer 2

Source.fromInputStream(is).mkString("") will also do the deed.....

Answer 3

Faster way to do this:

    private def inputStreamToString(is: InputStream) = {
        val inputStreamReader = new InputStreamReader(is)
        val bufferedReader = new BufferedReader(inputStreamReader)
        Iterator continually bufferedReader.readLine takeWhile (_ != null) mkString
    }