Java: PrintStream to String?

Question

I have a function that takes an object of a certain type, and a PrintStream to which to print, and outputs a representation of that object. How can I capture this function's output in a String? Specifically, I want to use it as in a toString method.

Answer 1

Use ByteArrayOutputStream as buffer:

ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
PrintStream ps = new PrintStream(baos);
your_function(object, ps);
String content = baos.toString(charsetName); // e.g. ISO-8859-1

Answer 2

You can construct a PrintStream with a ByteArrayOutputStream passed into the constructor which you can later use to grab the text written to the PrintStream.

ByteArrayOutputStream os = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
PrintStream ps = new PrintStream(os);
...
String output = os.toString("UTF8");

Answer 3

Maybe this question might help you: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/216894/get-an-outputstream-into-a-string

Subclass OutputStream and wrap it in PrintStream