Question

Is there a way to create a StringBuilder from a byte[]?

I want to improve memory usage using StringBuilder but what I have first is a byte[], so I have to create a String from the byte[] and then create the StringBuilder from the String and I don’t see this solution as optimal.

Thanks

Answer 1

Basically, your best option seems to be using CharsetDecoder directly.

Here’s how:

byte[] srcBytes = getYourSrcBytes();

//Whatever charset your bytes are endoded in
Charset charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
CharsetDecoder decoder = charset.newDecoder();

//ByteBuffer.wrap simply wraps the byte array, it does not allocate new memory for it
ByteBuffer srcBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(srcBytes);
//Now, we decode our srcBuffer into a new CharBuffer (yes, new memory allocated here, no can do)
CharBuffer resBuffer = decoder.decode(srcBuffer);

//CharBuffer implements CharSequence interface, which StringBuilder fully support in it's methods
StringBuilder yourStringBuilder = new StringBuilder(resBuffer);

ADDED:

After some tests it seems that the simple new String(bytes) is much faster and it seems there is no simple way to make it faster than that. Here is the test I ran:

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;
import java.nio.ByteBuffer;
import java.nio.CharBuffer;
import java.nio.charset.CharacterCodingException;
import java.nio.charset.Charset;
import java.nio.charset.CharsetDecoder;
import java.text.ParseException;

public class ConsoleMain {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException, ParseException {
        StringBuilder sb1 = new StringBuilder("abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz");
        for (int i=0;i<19;i++) {
            sb1.append(sb1);
        }
        System.out.println("Size of buffer: "+sb1.length());
        byte[] src = sb1.toString().getBytes("UTF-8");
        StringBuilder res;

        long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        res = testStringConvert(src);
        System.out.println("Conversion using String time (msec): "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-startTime));
        if (!res.toString().equals(sb1.toString())) {
            System.err.println("Conversion error");
        }

        startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        res = testCBConvert(src);
        System.out.println("Conversion using CharBuffer time (msec): "+(System.currentTimeMillis()-startTime));
        if (!res.toString().equals(sb1.toString())) {
            System.err.println("Conversion error");
        }
    }

    private static StringBuilder testStringConvert(byte[] src) throws UnsupportedEncodingException {
        String s = new String(src, "UTF-8");
        StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder(s);
        return b;
    }

    private static StringBuilder testCBConvert(byte[] src) throws CharacterCodingException {
        Charset charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8");
        CharsetDecoder decoder = charset.newDecoder();
        ByteBuffer srcBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(src);
        CharBuffer resBuffer = decoder.decode(srcBuffer);
        StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder(resBuffer);
        return b;
    }
}

Results:

Size of buffer: 13631488
Conversion using String time (msec): 91
Conversion using CharBuffer time (msec): 252

And a modified (less memory-consuming) version on IDEONE: Here.