Reading binary file from URLConnection

Question

I\'m trying to read a binary file from a URLConnection. When I test it with a text file it seems to work fine but for binary files it doesn\'t. I\'m using the following mime

Answer 1

If you are trying to read a binary stream, you should NOT wrap the InputStream in a Reader of any kind. Read the data into a byte array buffer using the InputStream.read(byte[], int, int) method. Then write from the buffer to a FileOutputStream.

The way you are currently reading/writing the file will convert it into "characters" and back to bytes using your platform's default character encoding. This is liable to mangle binary data.

(There is a charset (LATIN-1) that provides a 1-to-1 lossless mapping between bytes and a subset of the char value-space. However this is a bad idea even when the mapping works. You will be translating / copying the binary data from byte[] to char[] and back again ... which achieves nothing in this context.)