Convert InputStream to byte array in Java

Question

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

Answer 1

As always, also Spring framework (spring-core since 3.2.2) has something for you: StreamUtils.copyToByteArray()

Answer 2

See the InputStream.available() documentation:

It is particularly important to realize that you must not use this method to size a container and assume that you can read the entirety of the stream without needing to resize the container. Such callers should probably write everything they read to a ByteArrayOutputStream and convert that to a byte array. Alternatively, if you're reading from a file, File.length returns the current length of the file (though assuming the file's length can't change may be incorrect, reading a file is inherently racy).

Answer 3

You can use Apache Commons IO to handle this and similar tasks.

The IOUtils type has a static method to read an InputStream and return a byte[].

InputStream is;
byte[] bytes = IOUtils.toByteArray(is);

Internally this creates a ByteArrayOutputStream and copies the bytes to the output, then calls toByteArray(). It handles large files by copying the bytes in blocks of 4KiB.

Answer 4

You need to read each byte from your InputStream and write it to a ByteArrayOutputStream. You can then retrieve the underlying byte array by calling toByteArray(); e.g.

InputStream is = ...
ByteArrayOutputStream buffer = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

int nRead;
byte[] data = new byte[16384];

while ((nRead = is.read(data, 0, data.length)) != -1) {
  buffer.write(data, 0, nRead);
}

return buffer.toByteArray();

Answer 5

I use this.

public static byte[] toByteArray(InputStream is) throws IOException {
        ByteArrayOutputStream output = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        try {
            byte[] b = new byte[4096];
            int n = 0;
            while ((n = is.read(b)) != -1) {
                output.write(b, 0, n);
            }
            return output.toByteArray();
        } finally {
            output.close();
        }
    }

Answer 6

Here is an optimized version, that tries to avoid copying data bytes as much as possible:

private static byte[] loadStream (InputStream stream) throws IOException {
   int available = stream.available();
   int expectedSize = available > 0 ? available : -1;
   return loadStream(stream, expectedSize);
}

private static byte[] loadStream (InputStream stream, int expectedSize) throws IOException {
   int basicBufferSize = 0x4000;
   int initialBufferSize = (expectedSize >= 0) ? expectedSize : basicBufferSize;
   byte[] buf = new byte[initialBufferSize];
   int pos = 0;
   while (true) {
      if (pos == buf.length) {
         int readAhead = -1;
         if (pos == expectedSize) {
            readAhead = stream.read();       // test whether EOF is at expectedSize
            if (readAhead == -1) {
               return buf;
            }
         }
         int newBufferSize = Math.max(2 * buf.length, basicBufferSize);
         buf = Arrays.copyOf(buf, newBufferSize);
         if (readAhead != -1) {
            buf[pos++] = (byte)readAhead;
         }
      }
      int len = stream.read(buf, pos, buf.length - pos);
      if (len < 0) {
         return Arrays.copyOf(buf, pos);
      }
      pos += len;
   }
}