serialize java object to text file

Question

I have a java library, I would like to save an instance of a java object to a text file. I have tried to use all java libraries for serialization and deserialization to xml:

Answer 1

The easiest way is probably to use the native Java serialization. It will generate a binary representation of the object, but you can encode the generated byte array with Base64 to transform it to text:

ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(baos);
oos.writeObject(myObject);
oos.flush();
byte[] binary = baos.toByteArray();
String text = Base64.encodeBase64String(binary); // Base64 is in the apache commons codec library
// save text to a file

Note that the object, and every object it references (recursively) must implement java.io.Serializable for this to work.