Conversion from byte[] to char[]

[Abiodun Adisa]

Hello i have a byte array and i am trying to convert this to a char array, Can anyone offer suggestions please

[Rob Spoor]

What do these bytes represent? How did you get it?

I think that a String could be the intermediate way:

String s = new String(bytes); // possibly with a charset
char[] chars = s.toCharArray();

[Jiuxing Liu]

I think this:

Byte[] byte = new Byte[3]; // byte array
byte[0] = 1;
byte[1] = 2;
byte[2] = 3;

StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder();
for(int i;i < byte.length();i++){
buffer.append(byte[i]);
}

//get char array
char[] ch = buffer.toString().toCharArray();

[V Kumar]

Why not directly do

byte[] bytes = new byte[3]; // byte array
bytes[0] = 1;
bytes[1] = 2;
bytes[2] = 3;

char[] convertedChar = new char[bytes.length];
for(int i=0;i < bytes.length;i++){
convertedChar[i]=(char)bytes[i];
}

[Jesper de Jong]

I guess that byte array contains text in a certain character encoding, and you want to make characters out of it.

Michael's solution converts the byte values to numeric strings. So if the bytes would have the values 65, 66, 67, the string would become "656667". Is that what you want?

Vikram's solution directly casts the bytes to chars. This assumes that the bytes are perhaps ASCII characters. If the bytes would contain 65, 66, 67, you would get "ABC".

If you know what character encoding the text in the bytes is in, then you can pass that to the constructor of class String to do the conversion correctly. For example:

byte[] data = ...;   // wherever you get this from
 
String text1 = new String(data, "UTF-8");   // if the charset is UTF-8
 
String text2 = new String(data, "ISO-8859-1");   // if the charset is ISO Latin 1
 
char[] chars = text1.toCharArray();

[Jiuxing Liu]

Yes,Jesper's reply is good!

we should do that:

byte[] bytes = ...;
String str = new String(bytes); //using the platform's default charset
Char[] chars = str.toCharArray();

[Jesper de Jong]

Well, credit should also go to Rob Prime who posted the same thing above!