Reading a binary input stream into a single byte array in Java

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The simplest approach IMO is to use Guava and its ByteStreams class:

byte[] bytes = ByteStreams.toByteArray(in);

Or for a file:

byte[] bytes = Files.toByteArray(file);

Alternatively (if you didn’t want to use Guava), you could create a ByteArrayOutputStream, and repeatedly read into a byte array and write into the ByteArrayOutputStream (letting that handle resizing), then call ByteArrayOutputStream.toByteArray().

Note that this approach works whether you can tell the length of your input or not – assuming you have enough memory, of course.

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