GZIP compression to a byte array

Question

I am trying to write a class that can compress data. The below code fails (no exception is thrown, but the target .gz file is empty.)
Besides: I don\'t want to generate

Answer 1

You can use the below function, it is tested and working fine.

In general, your code has serious problem of ignoring the exceptions! returning null or simply not printing anything in the catch block will make it very difficult to debug

You do not have to write the zip output to a file if you want to process it further (e.g. encrypt it), you can easily modify the code to write the output to in-memory stream

public static String zip(File inFile, File zipFile) throws IOException {        
    FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(inFile);
    FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(zipFile);
    ZipOutputStream zout = new ZipOutputStream(fos);

    try {
        zout.putNextEntry(new ZipEntry(inFile.getName()));
        byte[] buffer = new byte[BUFFER_SIZE];
        int len;
        while ((len = fis.read(buffer)) > 0) {
            zout.write(buffer, 0, len);
        }
        zout.closeEntry();
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        ex.printStackTrace();
        return null;
    } finally {
        try{zout.close();}catch(Exception ex){ex.printStackTrace();}
        try{fis.close();}catch(Exception ex){ex.printStackTrace();}         
    }
    return zipFile.getAbsolutePath();
}