Read text and binary from one stream in Java

Question

I'd like to read text and binary from a stream, where the stream could be a file or a URL connection. Both streams have the same format, where there's an ASCII text header followed by a large binary block of data. I'm using DataInputStream to do this. For files, I'm using

DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(new FileInputStream(new File("test")));

For URL's, I'm using (where uc is initialized to point to a URL):

DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(new BufferedInputStream(uc.getInputStream()));

After setting up the DataInputStream, I follow that with:

dis.readLine()
dis.read(buf);

This works, but I noticed that readLine is depecrated (even though there are posts that refer to using it). Is it OK to keep using it since my text is ASCII? If that's not a good idea, and I go with the JDK recommendation to use BufferedReader, is there a way to access both text and binary? I tried BufferedReader to get the text header, but then I got incorrect binary data when using the underlying stream, probably because some of it was already consumed.

How long are the ASCII text headers? Are they of fixed length? Could you read the header as "binary data" and convert to one or more Strings? — John Glassmyer
– John Glassmyer, Commented Dec 6, 2011 at 1:46
The header is variable length, and I need to look for a delimiter to know where the binary data starts. But as you say, I think I can read the text as binary (using readByte) and build up a String. Thanks. — Ravi
– Ravi, Commented Dec 6, 2011 at 1:51

Ravi · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-20 01:31:30Z

0

The reason it was deprecated was the failure to properly convert bytes to chars. Since this example is limited to ASCII, there's no problem in using it.

answered Jan 20, 2012 at 1:31

Ravi

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