Create a string from characters

Question

Hi, I'd like to know if my code looks good.
In these few lines there are a lot of new concepts for me, and being at the beginning with Java I'd like to have a supervision.
It compiles and runs fine, but I don't know if I could semplify/improve it.
private String computeMD5(Reader r) throws IOException
   try
      StringWriter fileContent = new StringWriter();
      int character;
      while ((character = r.read()) != -1)
         fileContent.write(character);
       return MD5sum(fileContent.toString());
   finally
      r.close();
}Thanks

Answer 1

It is unusual to do MD5 on a Reader since MD5 is designed for bytes and the MessageDigest class has methods for appending bytes. I would have expect an InputStream rather than a reader.
I suspect that you are using the wrong approach but without seeing more code I can't be sure.
P.S. I hope you don't convert your digest bytes to a String using
String digestAsString = new String(digestAsBytes);