Develop Reference

Read byte array into base64 encoded image

I'm trying to read an image into a ByteArrayOutputStream and then encode the array into Base64 for sending as part of a json to my API. I'm wanting to avoid saving it anywhere and just read it, encode, and send. Unfortunately, when I use the ByteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray() as a parameter in Base64.getEncoder.encodeToString() method it returns a String that contains extra break characters '\' in the String as compared to a successful test reading from a File into Base64.
Is it possible to read directly from the byte array into base 64? Or will I have to translate into an image then to base 64?
Any help is appreciated.

Getting Image from base64:
byte[] b = DatatypeConverter.parseBase64Binary(base64Img);
ByteArrayInputStream s = new ByteArrayInputStream(b);
return new Image(s);
Maybe it can help you to do the reverse.

Apparently, passing the outputstream directly into the encoder was the issue. I added a local variable to reference the byte[] and then pass it into the encoder and it now works.
byte[] array = outputStream.toByteArray();
String base64String = Base64.getEncoder().encodeToString(array);

Uploading image to server corrupts the image

I have in my application a image upload method that need to send a image and a string to my server.
The problem is that the server receives the content (image and string) but when it saves the image on the disk it is corrupted and can't be opened.
This is the relevant part of the script.
HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url);
Bitmap bmp = ((BitmapDrawable) imageView.getDrawable()).getBitmap();
ByteArrayOutputStream stream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
bmp.compress(Bitmap.CompressFormat.PNG, 100, stream);
byte[] byteArray = stream.toByteArray();
String byteStr = new String(byteArray);
StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
stringBuilder.append("--"+boundary+"\r\n");
stringBuilder.append("Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"content\"\r\n\r\n");
stringBuilder.append(message+"\r\n");
stringBuilder.append("--"+boundary+"\r\n");
stringBuilder.append("Content-Disposition: form-data; name=\"image\"; filename=\"image.jpg\"\r\n");
stringBuilder.append("Content-Type: image/jpeg\r\n\r\n");
stringBuilder.append(byteStr);
stringBuilder.append("\r\n");
stringBuilder.append("--"+boundary+"--\r\n");
StringEntity entity = new StringEntity(stringBuilder.toString());
httpPost.setEntity(entity);
I can't change the server because other clients use it and it works for them. I just need to understand why the image is being corrupted.

When you do new String(byteArray), it's converting binary into the default character set (which is typically UTF-8). Most character sets aren't a suitable encoding for binary data. In other words if you were to encode certain binary strings to UTF-8 and then decode back to binary, you would not get the same binary string.
Since you're using multipart encoding, you need to write directly to the stream of the entity. Apache HTTP Client has helpers for doing this. See this guide, or this Android guide to uploading with multipart.
If you NEED to using strings only, you can safely convert your byte array to a string with
String byteStr = android.util.Base64.encode(byteArray, android.util.Base64.DEFAULT);
But it's important to note that your server will need to Base64 decode the string back to a byte array and save it to an image. Further, the transfer size will be greater because Base64 encoding isn't as space efficient as raw binary.

Your solutions above is not working because you are using new String(byteArray). The constructor encodes the byte array using the default encoding - see What is the default encoding - and it is very likely, that you have byte sequences in your data that cannot be encoded into a character.
To be more precise, a charset defines how characters are represented as bytes.
Most charsets have more than 256 characters. That is why you need more than one byte to represent a character. UTF-8 and UTF-16 uses up to four bytes.
So you have a mapping between the number space and the character space and this mapping is not bejectiv a priori. So it is very likely that there exist a number in the number space that have no character mapped to it.
The solution #Samuel suggested is foolproof because Base64 uses A–Z, a–z, 0–9, + , / and terminates with = to represent a byte. I would prefer this solution!
If you don't want or cannot use Base64, than you can try just to throw in every byte as it is into the StringBuilder hoping that the server does not do any encoding before you get it.
for (byte b : byteArray) {
stringBuilder.append((char)b);
}
I do not recommand that solution in general, but it may help you to get your stuff done.

Java: How to restore string data which was compressed with python's zlib encoder

I send data through the socket from python to java.
So on the python 2.7 side I have:
s = "this is test str"
compressed = s.encode('zlib')
push_to_tcp_socket(compressed)
So I need to restore initial string on the java side. How I could do that?

You will need to send gthe length of the string, or close the connection so you know where the last byte is.
The most likely class to help you is the DeflatorInputStream which youc an use once the bytes have been read. This is a bare wrapper for the zlib class. I haven't tested it works with python but it's you best option.
You can try other compressions like Snappy or LZ4 which have cross platform support.

I assumed you already know the networking part on Java. You can use Inflater class to get your string like in javadocs
// Decompress the bytes
Inflater decompresser = new Inflater();
decompresser.setInput(output, 0, compressedDataLength);
byte[] result = new byte[100];
int resultLength = decompresser.inflate(result);
decompresser.end();
//Then create string in java i assumed you are using python 2 and string is ASCII
String str = new String(result,"US-ASCII")

Reading a binary file from the file system as a BLOB to use in rhino with javascript

I'm planing to use SheetJS with rhino. And sheetjs takes a binary object(BLOB if i'm correct) as it's input. So i need to read a file from the system using stranded java I/O methods and store it into a blob before passing it to sheetjs. eg :-
var XLDataWorkBook = XLSX.read(blobInput, {type : "binary"});
So how can i create a BLOB(or appropriate type) from a binary file in java in order to pass it in.
i guess i cant pass streams because i guess XLSX needs a completely created object to process.

I found the answer to this by myself. i was able to get it done this way.
Read the file with InputStream and then write it to a ByteArrayOutputStream. like below.
ByteArrayOutputStream buffer = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
...
buffer.write(bytes, 0, len);
Then create a byte array from it.
byte[] byteArray = buffer.toByteArray();
Finally i did convert it to a Base64 String (which is also applicable in my case) using the "Base64.encodeBase64String()" method in apache.commons.codec.binary package. So i can pass Base64 String as a method parameter.
If you further need there are lot of libraries(3rd-party and default) available for Base64 to Blob conversion as well.

How do you convert binary data to Strings and back in Java?

I have binary data in a file that I can read into a byte array and process with no problem. Now I need to send parts of the data over a network connection as elements in an XML document. My problem is that when I convert the data from an array of bytes to a String and back to an array of bytes, the data is getting corrupted. I've tested this on one machine to isolate the problem to the String conversion, so I now know that it isn't getting corrupted by the XML parser or the network transport.
What I've got right now is
byte[] buffer = ...; // read from file
// a few lines that prove I can process the data successfully
String element = new String(buffer);
byte[] newBuffer = element.getBytes();
// a few lines that try to process newBuffer and fail because it is not the same data anymore
Does anyone know how to convert binary to String and back without data loss?
Answered: Thanks Sam. I feel like an idiot. I had this answered yesterday because my SAX parser was complaining. For some reason when I ran into this seemingly separate issue, it didn't occur to me that it was a new symptom of the same problem.
EDIT: Just for the sake of completeness, I used the Base64 class from the Apache Commons Codec package to solve this problem.

String(byte[]) treats the data as the default character encoding. So, how bytes get converted from 8-bit values to 16-bit Java Unicode chars will vary not only between operating systems, but can even vary between different users using different codepages on the same machine! This constructor is only good for decoding one of your own text files. Do not try to convert arbitrary bytes to chars in Java!
Encoding as base64 is a good solution. This is how files are sent over SMTP (e-mail). The (free) Apache Commons Codec project will do the job.
byte[] bytes = loadFile(file);
//all chars in encoded are guaranteed to be 7-bit ASCII
byte[] encoded = Base64.encodeBase64(bytes);
String printMe = new String(encoded, "US-ASCII");
System.out.println(printMe);
byte[] decoded = Base64.decodeBase64(encoded);
Alternatively, you can use the Java 6 DatatypeConverter:
import java.io.*;
import java.nio.channels.*;
import javax.xml.bind.DatatypeConverter;
public class EncodeDecode {
public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
File file = new File("/bin/ls");
byte[] bytes = loadFile(file, new ByteArrayOutputStream()).toByteArray();
String encoded = DatatypeConverter.printBase64Binary(bytes);
System.out.println(encoded);
byte[] decoded = DatatypeConverter.parseBase64Binary(encoded);
// check
for (int i = 0; i < bytes.length; i++) {
assert bytes[i] == decoded[i];
}
}
private static <T extends OutputStream> T loadFile(File file, T out)
throws IOException {
FileChannel in = new FileInputStream(file).getChannel();
try {
assert in.size() == in.transferTo(0, in.size(), Channels.newChannel(out));
return out;
} finally {
in.close();
}
}
}

If you encode it in base64, this will turn any data into ascii safe text, but base64 encoded data is larger than the orignal data

See this question, How do you embed binary data in XML?
Instead of converting the byte[] into String then pushing into XML somewhere, convert the byte[] to a String via BASE64 encoding (some XML libraries have a type to do this for you). The BASE64 decode once you get the String back from XML.
Use http://commons.apache.org/codec/
You data may be getting messed up due to all sorts of weird character set restrictions and the presence of non-priting characters. Stick w/ BASE64.

How are you building your XML document? If you use java's built in XML classes then the string encoding should be handled for you.
Take a look at the javax.xml and org.xml packages. That's what we use for generating XML docs, and it handles all the string encoding and decoding quite nicely.
---EDIT:
Hmm, I think I misunderstood the problem. You're not trying to encode a regular string, but some set of arbitrary binary data? In that case the Base64 encoding suggested in an earlier comment is probably the way to go. I believe that's a fairly standard way of encoding binary data in XML.