Why does android.util.Base64 return a different string?

Question

I'm using android.util.Base64 to encode a username + password for HTTP Basic Authentication like so:

String encoded = Base64.encodeToString((username+":"+password).getBytes(), Base64.NO_WRAP);

If I used "user" & "pass" for the username and password I would expect to get dXNlcjpwYXNzCg== (from openssl)

echo 'user:pass' | openssl base64

but instead I get this:

returned string

Any ideas why this is?

Thanks,

Jake

Note: Simply passing the resulting string to a show progress dialog:

Tools.ShowProgress(encoded, Login.this);

Remember that echo prints a \n character at the end of the line. avoid this with the -n option: echo -n "user:pass" | openssl base64 — nkr
– nkr, Commented Sep 27, 2012 at 19:14

Brendan Long · Accepted Answer · 2012-09-27 19:02:30Z

5

(username+":"+password).getBytes()

String.getBytes() returns the bytes of the string in the current platform encoding. To ensure you match other platforms, you probably want to use String.getBytes(Charset) with UTF-8:

(username+":"+password).getBytes("UTF-8")

If that's not the issue, another thing to check is if your input is what you think it is:

String input = username+":"+password;
log.warn("Input was: " + input);
// calculate base64

edited Sep 27, 2012 at 19:02

answered Sep 27, 2012 at 18:54

Brendan Long

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1 Comment

Jake Burton Over a year ago

Thanks! Turns out I missed out a getText() on one of my inputs instead of username.getText().toString() I had username.toString()

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