Decompress GZip string in Java

Question

I can find plenty of functions that let you decompress a GZip file, but how do I decompress a GZip string?

I'm trying to parse a HTTP response where the response body is compressed with GZip. However, the entire response is simply stored in a string so part of the string contains binary chars.

I'm attempting to use:

byte responseBodyBytes[] = responseBody.getBytes();
ByteArrayInputStream bais = new ByteArrayInputStream(responseBodyBytes); 
GZIPInputStream gzis = new GZIPInputStream(bais);

But that just throws an exception: java.io.IOException: Not in GZIP format

Answer 1

There's no such thing as a GZip string. GZip is binary, strings are text.

If you want to compress a string, you need to convert it into binary first - e.g. with OutputStreamWriter chained to a compressing OutputStream (e.g. a GZIPOutputStream)

Likewise to read the data, you can use an InputStreamReader chained to a decompressing InputStream (e.g. a GZIPInputStream).

One way of easily reading from a Reader is to use CharStreams.toString(Readable) from Guava, or a similar library.