PDF to byte array and vice versa

Question

Java 7 introduced Files.readAllBytes(), which can read a PDF into a byte[] like so:

import java.nio.file.Path;
import java.nio.file.Paths;
import java.nio.file.Files;

Path pdfPath = Paths.get("/path/to/file.pdf");
byte[] pdf = Files.readAllBytes(pdfPath);

EDIT:

Thanks Farooque for pointing out: this will work for reading any kind of file, not just PDFs. All files are ultimately just a bunch of bytes, and as such can be read into a byte[].

You basically need a helper method to read a stream into memory. This works pretty well:

public static byte[] readFully(InputStream stream) throws IOException
{
    byte[] buffer = new byte[8192];
    ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

    int bytesRead;
    while ((bytesRead = stream.read(buffer)) != -1)
    {
        baos.write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
    }
    return baos.toByteArray();
}

Then you'd call it with:

public static byte[] loadFile(String sourcePath) throws IOException
{
    InputStream inputStream = null;
    try 
    {
        inputStream = new FileInputStream(sourcePath);
        return readFully(inputStream);
    } 
    finally
    {
        if (inputStream != null)
        {
            inputStream.close();
        }
    }
}

Don't mix up text and binary data - it only leads to tears.

The problem is that you are calling toString() on the InputStream object itself. This will return a String representation of the InputStream object not the actual PDF document.

You want to read the PDF only as bytes as PDF is a binary format. You will then be able to write out that same byte array and it will be a valid PDF as it has not been modified.

e.g. to read a file as bytes

File file = new File(sourcePath);
InputStream inputStream = new FileInputStream(file); 
byte[] bytes = new byte[file.length()];
inputStream.read(bytes);

You can do it by using Apache Commons IO without worrying about internal details.

Use org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils.readFileToByteArray(File file) which return data of type byte[].

Click here for Javadoc

public static void main(String[] args) throws FileNotFoundException, IOException {
        File file = new File("java.pdf");

        FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(file);
        //System.out.println(file.exists() + "!!");
        //InputStream in = resource.openStream();
        ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        byte[] buf = new byte[1024];
        try {
            for (int readNum; (readNum = fis.read(buf)) != -1;) {
                bos.write(buf, 0, readNum); //no doubt here is 0
                //Writes len bytes from the specified byte array starting at offset off to this byte array output stream.
                System.out.println("read " + readNum + " bytes,");
            }
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            Logger.getLogger(genJpeg.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex);
        }
        byte[] bytes = bos.toByteArray();

        //below is the different part
        File someFile = new File("java2.pdf");
        FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(someFile);
        fos.write(bytes);
        fos.flush();
        fos.close();
    }

This worked for me. I haven't used any third-party libraries. Just the ones that are shipped with Java.

import java.io.*;
import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Path;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

public class PDFUtility {

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
    /**
     * Converts byte stream into PDF.
     */
    PDFUtility pdfUtility = new PDFUtility();
    byte[] byteStreamPDF = pdfUtility.convertPDFtoByteStream();
    FileOutputStream fileOutputStream = new FileOutputStream("C:\\Users\\aseem\\Desktop\\BlaFolder\\BlaFolder2\\aseempdf.pdf");
    fileOutputStream.write(byteStreamPDF);
    fileOutputStream.close();
    System.out.println("File written successfully");
}

/**
 * Creates PDF to Byte Stream
 *
 * @return
 * @throws IOException
 */
protected byte[] convertPDFtoByteStream() throws IOException {
    Path path = Paths.get("C:\\Users\\aseem\\aaa.pdf");
    return Files.readAllBytes(path);
}

}

Are'nt you creating the pdf file but not actually writing the byte array back? Therefore you cannot open the PDF.

out = new FileOutputStream("D:/ABC_XYZ/1.pdf");
out.Write(b, 0, b.Length);
out.Position = 0;
out.Close();

This is in addition to correctly reading in the PDF to byte array.