Gets byte array from a ByteBuffer in java

Question

Is this the recommended way to get the bytes from the ByteBuffer

ByteBuffer bb =..

byte[] b = new byte[bb.remaining()]
bb.get(b, 0, b.length);

Answer 1

Note that the bb.array() doesn't honor the byte-buffers position, and might be even worse if the bytebuffer you are working on is a slice of some other buffer.

I.e.

byte[] test = "Hello World".getBytes("Latin1");
ByteBuffer b1 = ByteBuffer.wrap(test);
byte[] hello = new byte[6];
b1.get(hello); // "Hello "
ByteBuffer b2 = b1.slice(); // position = 0, string = "World"
byte[] tooLong = b2.array(); // Will NOT be "World", but will be "Hello World".
byte[] world = new byte[5];
b2.get(world); // world = "World"

Which might not be what you intend to do.

If you really do not want to copy the byte-array, a work-around could be to use the byte-buffer's arrayOffset() + remaining(), but this only works if the application supports index+length of the byte-buffers it needs.