Question

I want to embed data directly inside of a GCM (Google Cloud Message) in order to help my application skip a round trip to my server.

Google says the total data payload needs to fit inside 4kb. Data is sent using [key,value] pairs. Assuming I did something like this:

 String key = "key";
 String data = "data";
 Message message = new Message.Builder().addData(key, data).build();
 sender.send(message, regId, 5);

How can I know if the String data is less than 4kb? To my knowledge there’s no way to really do a String.getSize() or similar.

Link to the documentation if curious:
http://developer.android.com/training/cloudsync/gcm.html#embed

Answer 1

You can use the following to get the bytes of a String:

String s = "some text here";
byte[] b = s.getBytes("UTF-8");
int bytes = b.length;

Make sure that you specify the encoding of the String, as different encodings may take up a different number of bytes for the same String. In the above example, UTF-8 is used as the encoding.

To convert the bytes into kB, just divide by 1024.

EDIT: Here’s a nice and detailed answer on the byte space of different encodings in Java from Geobits’ comment.