java - Converting char array into byte array and back again

Question

I'm looking to convert a Java char array to a byte array without creating an intermediate String, as the char array contains a password. I've looked up a couple of methods, but they all seem to fail:

char[] password = "password".toCharArray();

byte[] passwordBytes1 = new byte[password.length*2];
ByteBuffer.wrap(passwordBytes1).asCharBuffer().put(password);

byte[] passwordBytes2 = new byte[password.length*2];
for(int i=0; i<password.length; i++) {
    passwordBytes2[2*i] = (byte) ((password[i]&0xFF00)>>8); 
    passwordBytes2[2*i+1] = (byte) (password[i]&0x00FF); 
}

String passwordAsString = new String(password);
String passwordBytes1AsString = new String(passwordBytes1);
String passwordBytes2AsString = new String(passwordBytes2);

System.out.println(passwordAsString);
System.out.println(passwordBytes1AsString);
System.out.println(passwordBytes2AsString);
assertTrue(passwordAsString.equals(passwordBytes1) || passwordAsString.equals(passwordBytes2));

The assertion always fails (and, critically, when the code is used in production, the password is rejected), yet the print statements print out password three times. Why are passwordBytes1AsString and passwordBytes2AsString different from passwordAsString, yet appear identical? Am I missing out a null terminator or something? What can I do to make the conversion and unconversion work?

Answer 1

Conversion between char and byte is character set encoding and decoding.I prefer to make it as clear as possible in code. It doesn't really mean extra code volume:

 Charset latin1Charset = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-1"); 
 charBuffer = latin1Charset.decode(ByteBuffer.wrap(byteArray)); // also decode to String
 byteBuffer = latin1Charset.encode(charBuffer);                 // also decode from String

Aside:

java.nio classes and java.io Reader/Writer classes use ByteBuffer & CharBuffer (which use byte[] and char[] as backing arrays). So often preferable if you use these classes directly. However, you can always do:

 byteArray = ByteBuffer.array();  byteBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(byteArray);  
 byteBuffer.get(byteArray);       charBuffer.put(charArray);
 charArray = CharBuffer.array();  charBuffer = ByteBuffer.wrap(charArray);
 charBuffer.get(charArray);       charBuffer.put(charArray);