Stream of bytes

Today's post is a short one.

So I was playing with streams, and by playing I mean I had to deal with them at work :P

Any way, I do know that unless you are absolutely sure about the content of the stream you should treat them as bytes always, but I made the mistake to handle them as string.
Any way that lead me to find Apache Commons IO, in particular IOUtils.

As it turns out I needed to read all the content from an HTTPInputStream and then returned as byte array.
For those of you who don't see the problem here, the thing is that it's a pain to read something of an input stream at place it in an array. Just to much code for something so simple. Even more if it's a byte array.

Any way a good friend of mine introduce me to this portion of the Apache common library.
(Do take a look at his blog it's just awesome)

And as a result here are the two lines of code that you'll need to do just that i.e. read from an input stream and place the content in a byte array:

import org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils;

return IOUtils.toByteArray((InputStream) yourObjecStream.getStream());

So that's it, please note the casting of the yourObjectStream is just a copy paste hehe.

Hope you enjoy it.