How to convert Strings to and from UTF8 byte arrays in Java

Question

In Java, I have a String and I want to encode it as a byte array (in UTF8, or some other encoding). Alternately, I have a byte array (in some known encoding) and I want to convert it into a Java String. How do I do these conversions?

Answer 1

Convert from String to byte[]:

String s = "some text here";
byte[] b = s.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);

Convert from byte[] to String:

byte[] b = {(byte) 99, (byte)97, (byte)116};
String s = new String(b, StandardCharsets.US_ASCII);

You should, of course, use the correct encoding name. My examples used US-ASCII and UTF-8, the two most common encodings.

Answer 2

Here's a solution that avoids performing the Charset lookup for every conversion:

import java.nio.charset.Charset;

private final Charset UTF8_CHARSET = Charset.forName("UTF-8");

String decodeUTF8(byte[] bytes) {
    return new String(bytes, UTF8_CHARSET);
}

byte[] encodeUTF8(String string) {
    return string.getBytes(UTF8_CHARSET);
}

Answer 3

String original = "hello world";
byte[] utf8Bytes = original.getBytes("UTF-8");

Answer 4

You can convert directly via the String(byte[], String) constructor and getBytes(String) method. Java exposes available character sets via the Charset class. The JDK documentation lists supported encodings.

90% of the time, such conversions are performed on streams, so you'd use the Reader/Writer classes. You would not incrementally decode using the String methods on arbitrary byte streams - you would leave yourself open to bugs involving multibyte characters.

Answer 5

My tomcat7 implementation is accepting strings as ISO-8859-1; despite the content-type of the HTTP request. The following solution worked for me when trying to correctly interpret characters like 'é' .

byte[] b1 = szP1.getBytes("ISO-8859-1");
System.out.println(b1.toString());

String szUT8 = new String(b1, "UTF-8");
System.out.println(szUT8);

When trying to interpret the string as US-ASCII, the byte info wasn't correctly interpreted.

b1 = szP1.getBytes("US-ASCII");
System.out.println(b1.toString());

Answer 6

As an alternative, StringUtils from Apache Commons can be used.

 byte[] bytes = {(byte) 1};
 String convertedString = StringUtils.newStringUtf8(bytes);

or

 String myString = "example";
 byte[] convertedBytes = StringUtils.getBytesUtf8(myString);

If you have non-standard charset, you can use getBytesUnchecked() or newString() accordingly.

Answer 7

I can't comment but don't want to start a new thread. But this isn't working. A simple round trip:

byte[] b = new byte[]{ 0, 0, 0, -127 };  // 0x00000081
String s = new String(b,StandardCharsets.UTF_8); // UTF8 = 0x0000, 0x0000,  0x0000, 0xfffd
b = s.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8); // [0, 0, 0, -17, -65, -67] 0x000000efbfbd != 0x00000081

I'd need b[] the same array before and after encoding which it isn't (this referrers to the first answer).

Answer 8

For decoding a series of bytes to a normal string message I finally got it working with UTF-8 encoding with this code:

/* Convert a list of UTF-8 numbers to a normal String
 * Usefull for decoding a jms message that is delivered as a sequence of bytes instead of plain text
 */
public String convertUtf8NumbersToString(String[] numbers){
    int length = numbers.length;
    byte[] data = new byte[length];

    for(int i = 0; i< length; i++){
        data[i] = Byte.parseByte(numbers[i]);
    }
    return new String(data, Charset.forName("UTF-8"));
}

Answer 9

If you are using 7-bit ASCII or ISO-8859-1 (an amazingly common format) then you don't have to create a new java.lang.String at all. It's much much more performant to simply cast the byte into char:

Full working example:

for (byte b : new byte[] { 43, 45, (byte) 215, (byte) 247 }) {
    char c = (char) b;
    System.out.print(c);
}

If you are not using extended-characters like Ä, Æ, Å, Ç, Ï, Ê and can be sure that the only transmitted values are of the first 128 Unicode characters, then this code will also work for UTF-8 and extended ASCII (like cp-1252).

Answer 10

Charset UTF8_CHARSET = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
String strISO = "{\"name\":\"א\"}";
System.out.println(strISO);
byte[] b = strISO.getBytes();
for (byte c: b) {
    System.out.print("[" + c + "]");
}
String str = new String(b, UTF8_CHARSET);
System.out.println(str);

Answer 11

//query is your json   

 DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
 HttpPost postRequest = new HttpPost("http://my.site/test/v1/product/search?qy=");

 StringEntity input = new StringEntity(query, "UTF-8");
 input.setContentType("application/json");
 postRequest.setEntity(input);   
 HttpResponse response=response = httpClient.execute(postRequest);

Answer 12

Reader reader = new BufferedReader(
    new InputStreamReader(
        new ByteArrayInputStream(
            string.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8)), StandardCharsets.UTF_8));

Answer 13

terribly late but i just encountered this issue and this is my fix:

private static String removeNonUtf8CompliantCharacters( final String inString ) {
    if (null == inString ) return null;
    byte[] byteArr = inString.getBytes();
    for ( int i=0; i < byteArr.length; i++ ) {
        byte ch= byteArr[i]; 
        // remove any characters outside the valid UTF-8 range as well as all control characters
        // except tabs and new lines
        if ( !( (ch > 31 && ch < 253 ) || ch == '\t' || ch == '\n' || ch == '\r') ) {
            byteArr[i]=' ';
        }
    }
    return new String( byteArr );
}