Convert byte[] to String

[Tay Thotheolh]

Hi. How do I convert byte[] to String like 'AEUKHJBJKBJJKBKJBKBB...' ? I am trying to encrypt a file and it returns a byte[]. I want to write the encrypted content to a file to store it so I thought it would be best to write to some String like the above mentioned. How do I do so ?

[Henry Wong]

Tay Thotheolh wrote:Hi. How do I convert byte[] to String like 'AEUKHJBJKBJJKBKJBKBB...' ? I am trying to encrypt a file and it returns a byte[]. I want to write the encrypted content to a file to store it so I thought it would be best to write to some String like the above mentioned. How do I do so ?

It depends on the type of file. There is a constructor that takes a byte array, but keep in mind that the result of an encryption should be binary data. So, you'll have a string that is binary data -- which doesn't work very well if you write it to a text file. And... if you are going to write to a binary file, it may be best to write the byte array directly.

Anyway, if it is a text file, then you need to encode the string... convert the binary data to a readable string. Base64 encoding is probably the most common encoding standard. And there should be Java libs for that.

Henry

[Pat Farrell]

Tay Thotheolh wrote:I want to write the encrypted content to a file to store it

Be very careful. Nearly all encryption/decryption algorithms are defined only on arrays of unsigned octets (roughly byte[])
These are not directly transferable to Java Strings without care or something like MIME-encoding. Just getting the bytes out of the String is not enough, as String are all Unicode, which convert to two or even three characters when you properly handle international encodings.

[Tay Thotheolh]

Thanks. I would look into the encoding.