The 100 in sample really means a "big enough" buffer here for simple use case, not necessarily means a "fixed size' buffer. Sure there is always room for doc improvement, especially given this is the API has been there for decade.
Deflater/Inflater.end() is for explicitly/proactively release of the memory resource held by the deflater/inflater, it does not have impact to the deflating/inflating result. the end() will be invoked by the finalizer. It might be reasonable to simply have a pair of static utility methods byte[] Deflater.deflate(byte[]); byte[] Inflater.deflate(byte[]); For the casual/simple/easy use scenario. Sherman On 10/08/2013 03:24 AM, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
I've been trying to use Deflater today and found it rather tricky. Two thoughts... 1) The class level Javadoc specifies a fixed size byte array of 100. http://download.java.net/jdk8/docs/api/java/util/zip/Deflater.html > From what I can tell from other searching and basic common sense, this cannot be right as the output size could well be bigger than 100. However, there is no real information in the Deflater class as to how the class is supposed to be used. I don't believe that kind of broken example is helpful. The best I found was http://java.dzone.com/articles/how-compress-and-uncompress which proposed a loop: Deflater deflater = new Deflater(); deflater.setInput(data); ByteArrayOutputStream outputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream(data.length); deflater.finish(); byte[] buffer = new byte[1024]; while (!deflater.finished()) { int count = deflater.deflate(buffer); // returns the generated code... index outputStream.write(buffer, 0, count); } outputStream.close(); byte[] output = outputStream.toByteArray(); Neither example call deflater.end(), which I believe to be a mistake as well. Is my analysis correct? Should I raise a bug for better documentation? (this appears to affect Inflater as well) 2) Even with the Javadoc change, the API is still far too complex. As a user, all I want is something like: byte[] compressed = Deflater.deflate(input, options...) and similar for Inflater. (I actually want to compress a String, and an override to handle that would be useful as well) Any thoughts on adding a convenience method to make the API a lot easier? Can I raise a bug for that? Stephen
