How can I access a byte array as shorts in Java
I have a an array of byte, size n, that really represents an array of short of size n/2. Before I write the array to a disk file I need to adjust the values by adding bias values stored in another array of short. In C++ I would just assign the address of the byte array to a pointer for a short array with a cast to short and use pointer arithmetic or use a union.
How may this be done in Java - I'm very new to Java BTW.
Answer
You could do the bit-twiddling yourself but I'd recommend taking a look at the ByteBuffer and ShortBuffer classes.
byte[] arr = ...
ByteBuffer bb = ByteBuffer.wrap(arr); // Wrapper around underlying byte[].
ShortBuffer sb = bb.asShortBuffer(); // Wrapper around ByteBuffer.
// Now traverse ShortBuffer to obtain each short.
short s1 = sb.get();
short s2 = sb.get(); // etc.