Solution for : How to convert an InputStream into a String in Java ?

Problem :

If you have a java.io.InputStream object, how should you process that object and produce a String ?

We suppose that we have an InputStream that contains text data, and we want to convert it to a String, so for example we can write that to a log file. What is the easiest way to take the InputStream and convert it to a String?

public String convertStreamToString(InputStream is) {
    // ???
}

Solution :

A nice way to do this is using Apache commons IOUtils to copy the InputStream into a StringWriter… something like

StringWriter writer = new StringWriter();
IOUtils.copy(inputStream, writer, encoding);
String theString = writer.toString();

or even

// NB: does not close inputStream, you'll have to use try-with-resources for that
String theString = IOUtils.toString(inputStream, encoding); 

Alternatively, you could use ByteArrayOutputStream if you don’t want to mix your Streams and Writers