Convert InputStream to byte array in Java

You need to read each byte from your InputStream and write it to a ByteArrayOutputStream. You can then retrieve the underlying byte array by calling toByteArray(); e.g.

InputStream is = ...
ByteArrayOutputStream buffer = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

int nRead;
byte[] data = new byte[16384];

while ((nRead = is.read(data, 0, data.length)) != -1) {
  buffer.write(data, 0, nRead);
}

buffer.flush();

return buffer.toByteArray();

i don't know why this is found so difficult (some pages to scroll in google). so i write my favorite answer here on page number one if googled for "java inputstream to bytearray":

Use Vanilla Javas "DataInputStream" and its "readFully" Method (exists at least since Java 1.4):

...
byte[] imgDataBa = new byte[(int)imgFile.length()];
DataInputStream dataIs = new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream(imgFile));
dataIs.readFully(imgDataBa);
...

there are some other flavors of this method, but this i used all the time for this use case

If you happen to use google guava, it'll be as simple as :

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

Do you really need the image as a byte[]? What exactly do you expect in the byte[] - the complete content of an image file, encoded in whatever format the image file is in, or RGB pixel values?

Other answers here show you how to read a file into a byte[]. Your byte[] will contain the exact contents of the file, and you'd need to decode that to do anything with the image data.

Java's standard API for reading (and writing) images is the ImageIO API, which you can find in the package javax.imageio. You can read in an image from a file with just a single line of code:

BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(new File("image.jpg"));

This will give you a BufferedImage, not a byte[]. To get at the image data, you can call getRaster() on the BufferedImage. This will give you a Raster object, which has methods to access the pixel data (it has several getPixel() / getPixels() methods).

Lookup the API documentation for javax.imageio.ImageIO, java.awt.image.BufferedImage, java.awt.image.Raster etc.

ImageIO supports a number of image formats by default: JPEG, PNG, BMP, WBMP and GIF. It's possible to add support for more formats (you'd need a plug-in that implements the ImageIO service provider interface).

See also the following tutorial: Working with Images

public static byte[] getBytesFromInputStream(InputStream is) throws IOException
{
    try (ByteArrayOutputStream os = new ByteArrayOutputStream();)
    {
        byte[] buffer = new byte[0xFFFF];

        for (int len; (len = is.read(buffer)) != -1;)
            os.write(buffer, 0, len);

        os.flush();

        return os.toByteArray();
    }
}

Input Stream is ...
ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
int next = in.read();
while (next > -1) {
    bos.write(next);
    next = in.read();
}
bos.flush();
byte[] result = bos.toByteArray();

If you don't want to use the Apache commons-io library, this snippet is taken from the sun.misc.IOUtils class. It's nearly twice as fast as the common implementation using ByteBuffers:

public static byte[] readFully(InputStream is, int length, boolean readAll)
        throws IOException {
    byte[] output = {};
    if (length == -1) length = Integer.MAX_VALUE;
    int pos = 0;
    while (pos < length) {
        int bytesToRead;
        if (pos >= output.length) { // Only expand when there's no room
            bytesToRead = Math.min(length - pos, output.length + 1024);
            if (output.length < pos + bytesToRead) {
                output = Arrays.copyOf(output, pos + bytesToRead);
            }
        } else {
            bytesToRead = output.length - pos;
        }
        int cc = is.read(output, pos, bytesToRead);
        if (cc < 0) {
            if (readAll && length != Integer.MAX_VALUE) {
                throw new EOFException("Detect premature EOF");
            } else {
                if (output.length != pos) {
                    output = Arrays.copyOf(output, pos);
                }
                break;
            }
        }
        pos += cc;
    }
    return output;
}

@Adamski: You can avoid buffer entirely.

Code copied from http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.io/File2ByteArray.html (Yes, it is very verbose, but needs half the size of memory as the other solution.)

// Returns the contents of the file in a byte array.
public static byte[] getBytesFromFile(File file) throws IOException {
    InputStream is = new FileInputStream(file);

    // Get the size of the file
    long length = file.length();

    // You cannot create an array using a long type.
    // It needs to be an int type.
    // Before converting to an int type, check
    // to ensure that file is not larger than Integer.MAX_VALUE.
    if (length > Integer.MAX_VALUE) {
        // File is too large
    }

    // Create the byte array to hold the data
    byte[] bytes = new byte[(int)length];

    // Read in the bytes
    int offset = 0;
    int numRead = 0;
    while (offset < bytes.length
           && (numRead=is.read(bytes, offset, bytes.length-offset)) >= 0) {
        offset += numRead;
    }

    // Ensure all the bytes have been read in
    if (offset < bytes.length) {
        throw new IOException("Could not completely read file "+file.getName());
    }

    // Close the input stream and return bytes
    is.close();
    return bytes;
}

ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
while (true) {
    int r = in.read(buffer);
    if (r == -1) break;
    out.write(buffer, 0, r);
}

byte[] ret = out.toByteArray();

I tried to edit @numan's answer with a fix for writing garbage data but edit was rejected. While this short piece of code is nothing brilliant I can't see any other better answer. Here's what makes most sense to me:

ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
byte[] buffer = new byte[1024]; // you can configure the buffer size
int length;

while ((length = in.read(buffer)) != -1) out.write(buffer, 0, length); //copy streams
in.close(); // call this in a finally block

byte[] result = out.toByteArray();

btw ByteArrayOutputStream need not be closed. try/finally constructs omitted for readability

Below Codes

public static byte[] serializeObj(Object obj) throws IOException {
  ByteArrayOutputStream baOStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
  ObjectOutputStream objOStream = new ObjectOutputStream(baOStream);

  objOStream.writeObject(obj); 
  objOStream.flush();
  objOStream.close();
  return baOStream.toByteArray(); 
}

OR

BufferedImage img = ...
ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(1000);
ImageIO.write(img, "jpeg", baos);
baos.flush();
byte[] result = baos.toByteArray();
baos.close();

/*InputStream class_InputStream = null;
I am reading class from DB 
class_InputStream = rs.getBinaryStream(1);
Your Input stream could be from any source
*/
int thisLine;
ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
while ((thisLine = class_InputStream.read()) != -1) {
    bos.write(thisLine);
}
bos.flush();
byte [] yourBytes = bos.toByteArray();

/*Don't forget in the finally block to close ByteArrayOutputStream & InputStream
 In my case the IS is from resultset so just closing the rs will do it*/

if (bos != null){
    bos.close();
}

Here is an optimized version, that tries to avoid copying data bytes as much as possible:

private static byte[] loadStream (InputStream stream) throws IOException {
   int available = stream.available();
   int expectedSize = available > 0 ? available : -1;
   return loadStream(stream, expectedSize); }

private static byte[] loadStream (InputStream stream, int expectedSize) throws IOException {
   int basicBufferSize = 0x4000;
   int initialBufferSize = (expectedSize >= 0) ? expectedSize : basicBufferSize;
   byte[] buf = new byte[initialBufferSize];
   int pos = 0;
   while (true) {
      if (pos == buf.length) {
         int readAhead = -1;
         if (pos == expectedSize) {
            readAhead = stream.read();       // test whether EOF is at expectedSize
            if (readAhead == -1) {
               return buf; }}
         int newBufferSize = Math.max(2 * buf.length, basicBufferSize);
         buf = Arrays.copyOf(buf, newBufferSize);
         if (readAhead != -1) {
            buf[pos++] = (byte)readAhead; }}
      int len = stream.read(buf, pos, buf.length - pos);
      if (len < 0) {
         return Arrays.copyOf(buf, pos); }
      pos += len; }}