How should I handle searching through byte arrays in Java?

Question

Preliminary: I am writting my own httpclient in Java. I am trying to parse out the contents of chunked encoding.

Here is my dilema: Since I am trying to parse out chunked http transfer encoding with a gzip payload there is a mix of ascii and binary. I can't just take the http resp content and convert it to a string and make use of StringUtils since the binary data can easily contain nil characters. So what I need to do is some basic things for parsing out each chunk and its chunk length (as per chunked transfer/HTTP/1.1 spec).

Are there any helpful ways of searching through byte arrays of binary/part ascii data for certain patterns (like a CR LF) (instead of just a single byte) ? Or must I write the for loops for this?

Answer 1

Thus, you basically need a ChunkedInputStream. Google gives enough hints. Apache HttpCore's variant is pretty concise. I'd suggest you to just use it rather than reinventing your own client.

Answer 2

If you really, really want to implement your own HTTP client stack from the ground up, try a Google search for "+java +bytestring". One of the first hits that I got was this ByteString class which would seem to do provide the kind of functionality you are asking for.

But I think @BalusC's approach is better.