Write x509 certificate into PEM formatted string in java?

Question

Is there some high level way to write an X509Certificate into a PEM formatted string? Currently I'm doing x509cert.encode() to write it into a DER formatted string, then base 64 encoding it and appending the header and footer to create a PEM string, but it seems bad. Especially since I have to throw in line breaks too.

Answer 1

This is not bad. Java doesn't provide any functions to write PEM files. What you are doing is the correct way. Even KeyTool does the same thing,

        BASE64Encoder encoder = new BASE64Encoder();
        out.println(X509Factory.BEGIN_CERT);
        encoder.encodeBuffer(cert.getEncoded(), out);
        out.println(X509Factory.END_CERT);

If you use BouncyCastle, you can use PEMWriter class to write out X509 certificate in PEM.