Doing something dumb trying to stream nested streams

[Pat Farrell]

I think I"m close, but I am not getting the expected output

            String wordsArg = "javaranch rocks";
            ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
            Base64OutputStream b64os = new Base64OutputStream(baos);
            GZIPOutputStream gzip = new GZIPOutputStream(b64os);
            gzip.write(wordsArg.getBytes("UTF-8"));
            gzip.flush();
            b64os.flush();
            compressedMime = baos.toString();
            System.out.println(compressedMime);

Specifically, if I try to use normal shell utilities to de-base64 and gunzip, I don't get the input string back.
I must be doing something trivially wrong.

Thanks
Pat

[Mike Simmons]

I think GZIP may not actually do anything until you close() it. Calling flush() may not be enough.

[Pat Farrell]

close() seems to make it work. Thanks

I didn't want to call close() because I was worried that it would make the buffer be no longer available.

[Mike Simmons]

I think the gzip algorithm wants to know that it has all the data before it compresses it. Or at least, before it considers the compression complete enough to send. A ZipOutputStream might work differently for you.

[Rob Spoor]

Pat Farrell wrote:I didn't want to call close() because I was worried that it would make the buffer be no longer available.

Normally that's a good thought, but ByteArrayOutputStream doesn't clear its buffer at all.

But GZIPOutputStream also had method finish() that does the same without closing the underlying stream.