Convert Byte Array to Charsequence in Android

Question

I have used the below code to convert Charsequence to Byte Array. Then I save the Byte Array as Blob to my Sqlite Database. For this , I have used the below code, ``` public static byte[] toByteArray(CharSequence charSequence) { if (charSequence == null) { return null; } byte[] barr = new byte[charSequence.length()]; for (int i = 0; i < barr.length; i++) { barr[i] = (byte) charSequence.charAt(i); } return barr; } ``` Now I would like to convert my byte array retrieved from sqlite to Charsequence. But I couldn't get any help on it. How to convert Byte Array to Charsequence? Any help is much appreciated.

Accepted Answer

To convert a `CharSequence` into a byte array

```
CharSequence seq;
Charset charset;
...
byte[] bytes = seq.toString().getBytes(charset);
```

To convert back again

```
CharSequence seq2 = new String(bytes, charset);
```

Just remember that `CharSequence` is an interface that is implemented by `String`, `StringBuilder`, `StringBuffer`, etc so all `String` instances are `CharSequence` instances but not all `CharSequence` instances are `String` but the contract for `CharSequence` is that its `toString()` method should return the equivalent `String`

Internally all strings in Java are represented as Unicode, so as long as the consumer and producer are both Java the safest charset to use is one of `UTF-8` or `UTF-16` depending on the likely encoding size of your data. Where Latin scripts predominate,

```
Charset charset = Charset.forName("UTF-8"); 
```

will 99.9% of the time give the most space efficient encoding, for non-latin character sets (e.g. Chinese) you may find `UTF-16` more space efficient depending on the data set you are encoding. You would need to have measurements showing that it is a more space efficient encoding and as `UTF-8` is more widely expected I recommend `UTF-8` as the default encoding in any case.

Convert Byte Array to Charsequence in Android

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