Passing strings[]'s as byte[]

I'm working on a network in which my python script will communicate with my java application. The python script is passing a DataPacket (ju开发者_如何学编程st a packet that holds some strings and a little other data) to the java server for processing. I know how to pack the information into a byte array, but how do I unpack it to be used as strings? What I've got so far is I have to parse the arrays of data in the packet and send it in bits and pieces. Is this the only way to do this? Can I use ByteInputStream and if so how?

thanks ~Aedon

I'm not sure that what you're doing is quite right, in that you're fragmenting your strings into separate packets. This could cause problems with multibyte strings.

However, you may wish to check out ByteArrayOutputStream. You can write into this, then convert to a String using toString(enc), where enc is the encoding you've used in your Python to convert your strings into bytes in the first place.

Looking at your comment below, it appears you need some means to serialise in Python and deserialise in Java. Leaving aside solutions like XML serialisation, have you looked at possible solutions like Google Protocol Buffers ?