File to byte[] in Java

Since JDK 7 - one liner:

byte[] array = Files.readAllBytes(Paths.get("/path/to/file"));

No external dependencies needed.

import java.io.RandomAccessFile;
RandomAccessFile f = new RandomAccessFile(fileName, "r");
byte[] b = new byte[(int)f.length()];
f.readFully(b);

Documentation for Java 8: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/io/RandomAccessFile.html

Basically you have to read it in memory. Open the file, allocate the array, and read the contents from the file into the array.

The simplest way is something similar to this:

public byte[] read(File file) throws IOException, FileTooBigException {
    if (file.length() > MAX_FILE_SIZE) {
        throw new FileTooBigException(file);
    }
    ByteArrayOutputStream ous = null;
    InputStream ios = null;
    try {
        byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
        ous = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
        ios = new FileInputStream(file);
        int read = 0;
        while ((read = ios.read(buffer)) != -1) {
            ous.write(buffer, 0, read);
        }
    }finally {
        try {
            if (ous != null)
                ous.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
        }

        try {
            if (ios != null)
                ios.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
        }
    }
    return ous.toByteArray();
}

This has some unnecessary copying of the file content (actually the data is copied three times: from file to buffer, from buffer to ByteArrayOutputStream, from ByteArrayOutputStream to the actual resulting array).

You also need to make sure you read in memory only files up to a certain size (this is usually application dependent) :-).

You also need to treat the IOException outside the function.

Another way is this:

public byte[] read(File file) throws IOException, FileTooBigException {
    if (file.length() > MAX_FILE_SIZE) {
        throw new FileTooBigException(file);
    }

    byte[] buffer = new byte[(int) file.length()];
    InputStream ios = null;
    try {
        ios = new FileInputStream(file);
        if (ios.read(buffer) == -1) {
            throw new IOException(
                    "EOF reached while trying to read the whole file");
        }
    } finally {
        try {
            if (ios != null)
                ios.close();
        } catch (IOException e) {
        }
    }
    return buffer;
}

This has no unnecessary copying.

FileTooBigException is a custom application exception. The MAX_FILE_SIZE constant is an application parameters.

For big files you should probably think a stream processing algorithm or use memory mapping (see java.nio).

As someone said, Apache Commons File Utils might have what you are looking for

public static byte[] readFileToByteArray(File file) throws IOException

Example use (Program.java):

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;
public class Program {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        File file = new File(args[0]);  // assume args[0] is the path to file
        byte[] data = FileUtils.readFileToByteArray(file);
        ...
    }
}

If you don't have Java 8, and agree with me that including a massive library to avoid writing a few lines of code is a bad idea:

public static byte[] readBytes(InputStream inputStream) throws IOException {
    byte[] b = new byte[1024];
    ByteArrayOutputStream os = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    int c;
    while ((c = inputStream.read(b)) != -1) {
        os.write(b, 0, c);
    }
    return os.toByteArray();
}

Caller is responsible for closing the stream.