I'm trying to understand a byte[] to string, string representation of byte[] to byte[] conversion... I convert my byte[] to a string to send, I then expect my web service (written in python) to echo the data straight back to the client.
When I send the data from my Java application...
Arrays.toString(data.toByteArray())
Bytes to send..
[B@405217f8
Send (This is the result of Arrays.toString() which should be a string representation of my byte data, this data will be sent across the wire):
[-47, 1, 16, 84, 2, 101, 110, 83, 111, 109, 101, 32, 78, 70, 67, 32, 68, 97, 116, 97]
On the python side, the python server returns a string to the caller (which I can see is the same as the string I sent to the server
[-47, 1, 16, 84, 2, 101, 110, 83, 111, 109, 101, 32, 78, 70, 67, 32, 68, 97, 116, 97]
The server should return this data to the client, where it can be verified.
The response my client receives (as a string) looks like
[-47, 1, 16, 84, 2, 101, 110, 83, 111, 109, 101, 32, 78, 70, 67, 32, 68, 97, 116, 97]
I can't seem to figure out how to get the received string back into a byte[]
Whatever I seem to try I end up getting a byte array which looks as follows...
[91, 45, 52, 55, 44, 32, 49, 44, 32, 49, 54, 44, 32, 56, 52, 44, 32, 50, 44, 32, 49, 48, 49, 44, 32, 49, 49, 48, 44, 32, 56, 51, 44, 32, 49, 49, 49, 44, 32, 49, 48, 57, 44, 32, 49, 48, 49, 44, 32, 51, 50, 44, 32, 55, 56, 44, 32, 55, 48, 44, 32, 54, 55, 44, 32, 51, 50, 44, 32, 54, 56, 44, 32, 57, 55, 44, 32, 49, 49, 54, 44, 32, 57, 55, 93]
or I can get a byte representation which is as follows:
B@2a80d889
Both of these are different from my sent data... I'm sure Im missing something truly simple....
Any help?!
You can't just take the returned string and construct a string from it... it's not a byte[]
data type anymore, it's already a string; you need to parse it. For example :
String response = "[-47, 1, 16, 84, 2, 101, 110, 83, 111, 109, 101, 32, 78, 70, 67, 32, 68, 97, 116, 97]"; // response from the Python script
String[] byteValues = response.substring(1, response.length() - 1).split(",");
byte[] bytes = new byte[byteValues.length];
for (int i=0, len=bytes.length; i<len; i++) {
bytes[i] = Byte.parseByte(byteValues[i].trim());
}
String str = new String(bytes);
** EDIT **
You get an hint of your problem in your question, where you say "Whatever I seem to try I end up getting a byte array which looks as follows... [91, 45, ...
", because 91
is the byte value for [
, so [91, 45, ...
is the byte array of the string "[-45, 1, 16, ...
" string.
The method Arrays.toString()
will return a String
representation of the specified array; meaning that the returned value will not be a array anymore. For example :
byte[] b1 = new byte[] {97, 98, 99};
String s1 = Arrays.toString(b1);
String s2 = new String(b1);
System.out.println(s1); // -> "[97, 98, 99]"
System.out.println(s2); // -> "abc";
As you can see, s1
holds the string representation of the array b1
, while s2
holds the string representation of the bytes contained in b1
.
Now, in your problem, your server returns a string similar to s1
, therefore to get the array representation back, you need the opposite constructor method. If s2.getBytes()
is the opposite of new String(b1)
, you need to find the opposite of Arrays.toString(b1)
, thus the code I pasted in the first snippet of this answer.