Convert InputStream to byte array in Java

Question

How do I read an entire InputStream into a byte array?

Answer 1

Do you really need the image as a byte[]? What exactly do you expect in the byte[] - the complete content of an image file, encoded in whatever format the image file is in, or RGB pixel values?

Other answers here show you how to read a file into a byte[]. Your byte[] will contain the exact contents of the file, and you'd need to decode that to do anything with the image data.

Java's standard API for reading (and writing) images is the ImageIO API, which you can find in the package javax.imageio. You can read in an image from a file with just a single line of code:

BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(new File("image.jpg"));

This will give you a BufferedImage, not a byte[]. To get at the image data, you can call getRaster() on the BufferedImage. This will give you a Raster object, which has methods to access the pixel data (it has several getPixel() / getPixels() methods).

Lookup the API documentation for javax.imageio.ImageIO, java.awt.image.BufferedImage, java.awt.image.Raster etc.

ImageIO supports a number of image formats by default: JPEG, PNG, BMP, WBMP and GIF. It's possible to add support for more formats (you'd need a plug-in that implements the ImageIO service provider interface).

See also the following tutorial: Working with Images

Answer 2

Java 7 and later:

import sun.misc.IOUtils;
...
InputStream in = ...;
byte[] buf = IOUtils.readFully(in, -1, false);

Answer 3

Below Codes

public static byte[] serializeObj(Object obj) throws IOException {
  ByteArrayOutputStream baOStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
  ObjectOutputStream objOStream = new ObjectOutputStream(baOStream);

  objOStream.writeObject(obj); 
  objOStream.flush();
  objOStream.close();
  return baOStream.toByteArray(); 
} 

OR

BufferedImage img = ...
ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(1000);
ImageIO.write(img, "jpeg", baos);
baos.flush();
byte[] result = baos.toByteArray();
baos.close();

Answer 4

ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
while (true) {
    int r = in.read(buffer);
    if (r == -1) break;
    out.write(buffer, 0, r);
}

byte[] ret = out.toByteArray();

Answer 5

You're doing an extra copy if you use ByteArrayOutputStream. If you know the length of the stream before you start reading it (e.g. the InputStream is actually a FileInputStream, and you can call file.length() on the file, or the InputStream is a zipfile entry InputStream, and you can call zipEntry.length()), then it's far better to write directly into the byte[] array -- it uses half the memory, and saves time.

// Read the file contents into a byte[] array
byte[] buf = new byte[inputStreamLength];
int bytesRead = Math.max(0, inputStream.read(buf));

// If needed: for safety, truncate the array if the file may somehow get
// truncated during the read operation
byte[] contents = bytesRead == inputStreamLength ? buf
                  : Arrays.copyOf(buf, bytesRead);

N.B. the last line above deals with files getting truncated while the stream is being read, if you need to handle that possibility, but if the file gets longer while the stream is being read, the contents in the byte[] array will not be lengthened to include the new file content, the array will simply be truncated to the old length inputStreamLength.

Answer 6

In-case someone is still looking for a solution without a dependency and If you have a file.

1) DataInputStream

 byte[] data = new byte[(int) file.length()];
 DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream(file));
 dis.readFully(data);
 dis.close();

2) ByteArrayOutputStream

 InputStream is = new FileInputStream(file);
 ByteArrayOutputStream buffer = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
 int nRead;
 byte[] data = new byte[(int) file.length()];
 while ((nRead = is.read(data, 0, data.length)) != -1) {
     buffer.write(data, 0, nRead);
 }

3) RandomAccessFile

 RandomAccessFile raf = new RandomAccessFile(file, "r");
 byte[] data = new byte[(int) raf.length()];
 raf.readFully(data);