How to make all characters of a 3DES encrypted string printable

Question

I am performing a triple DES on a string, and when I print out the encrypted data, it is 'chopping' off a character on the terminal.
For instance, I run the encrpytion ona string "blah", and print out the results:
java Test3Des blah
OUTPUT = ?$O4|
The problem here is that the string should have a "|" at the beginning of the output, not only the end. So I am not sure how I can 'pad' the output so that it can be saved to a file, and not remove characters around it in such a way that I can read it back in and decrypt to get "blah" back.
Thank you for the help....

Answer 1

Your encrypted bytes have all the information you need, what you need is to convert those bytes with a Base64 encoding class before you print them to the output. You don't need to do this before writing to a file, but it is best as them you don't have any problems with the Unicode only behavior of some of the InputStream subclasses. You didn't mention any JCE provider, but BouncyCastle offers a Base64 class as part of their implementation.
Another caveat, make sure to always specify the formatting when making String objects and writing to a file, etc., etc. I prefer "UTF-8" for it.