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conversion of byte array to string causing OOM

In my application i m storing strings using randomaccessfile and while reading back the string i need to convert byte array to string, which is causing OOM. Is there a better way to convert other than this
str = new String(b, "UTF-8");
where b is byte array

Is there a better way to convert other than new String(bytes, "UTF-8") ?
This is actually a rather complicated question.
This constructor cannot simply incorporate the byte[] into the string:
Prior to Java 9, it is always necessary to decode the byte array to a UTF-16 coded array of char. So the constructor is liable to allocate roughly double the memory used by the source byte[].
With Java 9 you have the option of using a new compact representation for String. If you do the AND if the UTF-8 encoded byte array only contains code-points in Unicode code-plane zero (\u0000 to \u00ff) then the String value is a byte[]. However, even in this case the constructor must copy the bytes to a new byte[].
In both cases, there is no more space-efficient way to create a String from a byte[]. Furthermore, I don't think there is a more space-efficient way do the conversion starting with a stream of bytes and a character count. (I am excluding things like modifying the lava.lang.* implementation, or breaking abstraction using reflection.)
Bottom line: when converting a byte[] to a String you should allow at least twice as much contiguous free memory as the original byte[] if you want your code to work on older JVMs.

Resource file format processing in Java

I am trying to implement a processor for a specific resource archive file format in Java. The format has a Header comprised of a three-char description, a dummy byte, plus a byte indicating the number of files.
Then each file has an entry consisting of a dummy byte, a twelve-char string describing the file name, a dummy byte, and an offset declared in a three-byte array.
What would be the proper class for reading this kind of structure? I have tried RandomAccessFile but it does not allow to read arrays of data, e.g. I can only read three chars by calling readChar() three times, etc.
Of course I can extend RandomAccessFile to do what I want but there's got to be a proper out-of-the-box class to do this kind of processing isn't it?
This is my reader for the header in C#:
protected override void ReadHeader()
{
Header = new string(this.BinaryReader.ReadChars(3));
byte dummy = this.BinaryReader.ReadByte();
NFiles = this.BinaryReader.ReadByte();
}

I think you got lucky with your C# code, as it relies on the character encoding to be set somewhere else, and if it didn't match the number of bytes per character in the file, your code would probably have failed.
The safest way to do this in Java would be to strictly read bytes and do the conversion to characters yourself. If you need seek abilities, then indeed RandomAccessFile would be your easiest solution, but it should be pointed out that InputStream allows skipping, so if you don`t need actual random access, just to skip some of the files, you could certainly use it.
In either case, you should read the bytes from the file per the file specification, and then convert them to characters based on a known encoding. You should never trust a file that was not written by a Java program to contain any Java data types other than byte, and even if it was written by Java, it may well have been converted to raw bytes while writing.
So your code should be something along the lines of:
String header = "";
int nFiles = 0;
RandomAccessFile raFile = new RandomAccessFile( "filename", "r" );
byte[] buffer = new byte[3];
int numRead = raFile.read( buffer );
header = new String( buffer, StandardCharsets.US_ASCII.name() );
int numSkipped = raFile.skipBytes(1);
nFiles = raFile.read(); // The byte is read as an integer between 0 and 255
Sanity checks (checking that actual 3 bytes were read, 1 byte was skipped and nFiles is not -1) and exception handling have been skipped for brevity.
It's more or less the same if you use InputStream.

I would go with MappedByteBuffer. This will allow you to seek arbitrarily, but will also deal efficiently and transparently with large files that are too large to fit comfortably in RAM.
This is, to my mind, the best way of reading structured binary data like this from a file.
You can then build your own data structure on top of that, to handle the specific file format.

Java String encoding

What´s the difference between
"hello world".getBytes("UTF-8");
and
Charset.forName("UTF-8").encode("hello world").array();
?
The second code produces a byte array with 0-bytes at the end in most cases.

Your second snippet uses ByteBuffer.array(), which just returns the array backing the ByteBuffer. That may well be longer than the content written to the ByteBuffer.
Basically, I would use the first approach if you want a byte[] from a String :) You could use other ways of dealing with the ByteBuffer to convert it to a byte[], but given that String.getBytes(Charset) is available and convenient, I'd just use that...
Sample code to retrieve the bytes from a ByteBuffer:
ByteBuffer buffer = Charset.forName("UTF-8").encode("hello world");
byte[] array = new byte[buffer.limit()];
buffer.get(array);
System.out.println(array.length); // 11
System.out.println(array[0]); // 104 (encoded 'h')

Does String(byte[]) create a deep copy of the byte array?

Or is it that it just gets a reference to it?
I have a byte array that gets re-written by an external library - is it safe to pass it into a String constructor, or should I create a clone first?
byte[] b = MagicLib.getData();
String s = new String(b);
// actually a pointer to previous memory, just with different data
b = MagicLib.getMoreData();

A String contains an array of chars, not bytes. Therefore, the String cannot share the byte's storage.
Additionally, note that the byte[] will be decoded into characters according to the platform default charset (per the documentation on String(byte[])), which implies further that a decoded version of the byte[] array has to be separately constructed.

In Oracle Java it returns a new char[] depending on the decoding charset used

Java Strings are immutable, so the entire array has to be copied. Otherwise, you could change the contents of the String by modifying the byte array.

How to convert Integer array to InputStream?

I would like to convert an integer array in java, to an Inputstream, after that I would like to use the stream of bytes to be decompressed using LZMA library.
int [] header = new int[copy.length];
edu.coeia.Compression.LZMA.Decoder decoder = new edu.coeia.Compression.LZMA.Decoder();
ByteArrayInputStream bStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(bheader);
bStream.coder(// InputSream of bytes);

What you need to do is convert the array of integers into an equivalent array of bytes, and then use the ByteArrayInputStream(byte[]) constructor to create the input stream. Finally, decode the stream using the code that you already have.
The first step (conversion) is probably the one that you are having difficulty with, but the code depends on how the bytes are represented in the integer array.