Convert a String to a byte array and then back to the original String

I would suggest using the members of string, but with an explicit encoding:

byte[] bytes = text.getBytes("UTF-8");
String text = new String(bytes, "UTF-8");

By using an explicit encoding (and one which supports all of Unicode) you avoid the problems of just calling text.getBytes() etc:

  • You're explicitly using a specific encoding, so you know which encoding to use later, rather than relying on the platform default.
  • You know it will support all of Unicode (as opposed to, say, ISO-Latin-1).

EDIT: Even though UTF-8 is the default encoding on Android, I'd definitely be explicit about this. For example, this question only says "in Java or Android" - so it's entirely possible that the code will end up being used on other platforms.

Basically given that the normal Java platform can have different default encodings, I think it's best to be absolutely explicit. I've seen way too many people using the default encoding and losing data to take that risk.

EDIT: In my haste I forgot to mention that you don't have to use the encoding's name - you can use a Charset instead. Using Guava I'd really use:

byte[] bytes = text.getBytes(Charsets.UTF_8);
String text = new String(bytes, Charsets.UTF_8);

You can do it like this.

String to byte array

String stringToConvert = "This String is 76 characters long and will be converted to an array of bytes";
byte[] theByteArray = stringToConvert.getBytes();

http://www.javadb.com/convert-string-to-byte-array

Byte array to String

byte[] byteArray = new byte[] {87, 79, 87, 46, 46, 46};
String value = new String(byteArray);

http://www.javadb.com/convert-byte-array-to-string


Use [String.getBytes()][1] to convert to bytes and use [String(byte[] data)][2] constructor to convert back to string.