I searched for an example of how to compress a string in Java.
I have a function to compress then uncompress. The compress seems to work fine:
public static String encStage1(String str)
{
String format1 = "ISO-8859-1";
String format2 = "UTF-8";
if (str == null || str.length() == 0)
{
return str;
}
System.out.println("String length : " + str.length());
ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
String outStr = null;
try
{
GZIPOutputStream gzip = new GZIPOutputStream(out);
gzip.write(str.getBytes());
gzip.close();
outStr = out.toString(format2);
System.out.println("Output String lenght : " + outStr.length());
} catch (Exception e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
return outStr;
}
But the reverse is complaining about the string not being in GZIP format, even when I pass the return from encStage1 straight back into the decStage3:
public static String decStage3(String str)
{
if (str == null || str.length() == 0)
{
return str;
}
System.out.println("Input String length : " + str.length());
String outStr = "";
try
{
String format1 = "ISO-8859-1";
String format2 = "UTF-8";
GZIPInputStream gis = new GZIPInputStream(new ByteArrayInputStream(str.getBytes(format2)));
BufferedReader bf = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(gis, format2));
String line;
while ((line = bf.readLine()) != null)
{
outStr += line;
}
System.out.println("Output String lenght : " + outStr.length());
} catch (Exception e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
return outStr;
}
I get this error when I call with a string return from encStage1:
public String encIDData(String idData)
{
String tst = "A simple test string";
System.out.println("Enc 0: " + tst);
String stg1 = encStage1(tst);
System.out.println("Enc 1: " + toHex(stg1));
String dec1 = decStage3(stg1);
System.out.println("unzip: " + toHex(dec1));
}
Output/Error:
Enc 0: A simple test string
String length : 20
Output String lenght : 40
Enc 1: 1fefbfbd0800000000000000735428efbfbdefbfbd2defbfbd495528492d2e51282e29efbfbdefbfbd4b07005aefbfbd21efbfbd14000000
Input String length : 40
java.io.IOException: Not in GZIP format
at java.util.zip.GZIPInputStream.readHeader(GZIPInputStream.java:137)
at java.util.zip.GZIPInputStream.<init>(GZIPInputStream.java:58)
at java.util.zip.GZIPInputStream.<init>(GZIPInputStream.java:68)
Answer
A small error is:
gzip.write(str.getBytes());
takes the default platform encoding, which on Windows will never be ISO-8859-1. Better:
gzip.write(str.getBytes(format1));
You could consider taking “Cp1252”, Windows Latin-1 (for some European languages), instead of “ISO-8859-1”, Latin-1. That adds comma like quotes and such.
The major error is converting the compressed bytes to a String. Java separates binary data (byte[], InputStream, OutputStream) from text (String, char, Reader, Writer) which internally is always kept in Unicode. A byte sequence does not need to be valid UTF-8. You might get away by converting the bytes as a single byte encoding (ISO-8859-1 for instance).
The best way would be
gzip.write(str.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
So you have full Unicode, every script may be combined.
And uncompressing to a ByteArrayOutputStream and new String(baos.toByteArray(), StandardCharsets.UTF_8).
Using BufferedReader on an InputStreamReader with UTF-8 is okay too, but a readLine throws away the newline characters
outStr += line + "rn"; // Or so.
Clean answer:
public static byte[] encStage1(String str) throws IOException
{
try (ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream())
{
try (GZIPOutputStream gzip = new GZIPOutputStream(out))
{
gzip.write(str.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_8));
}
return out.toByteArray();
//return out.toString(StandardCharsets.ISO_8859_1);
// Some single byte encoding
}
}
public static String decStage3(byte[] str) throws IOException
{
ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
try (GZIPInputStream gis = new GZIPInputStream(new ByteArrayInputStream(str)))
{
int b;
while ((b = gis.read()) != -1) {
baos.write((byte) b);
}
}
return new String(baos.toByteArray(), StandardCharset.UTF_8);
}