How to convert base64 data to an image

Question

Hello, my enterprise application is receiving base64 enocoded image data in an xml file. Now I need to convert it to a native image formats like jpeg/jpg/tiff/pdf etc. Does anybody know if there are any Java apis (both free/paid) which let you do this. Actually I would not have any idea of what type of image it was when it was initially encoded to base64 format. I am looking for an API/technique that can convert base64 data to any image depending on what I want at runtime.
Thanks a lot in advance.
R

Answer 1

Hi there,
I've had to deal with exactly the same problem myself. The images I had to deal with were all TIFF files, and that was okay, I'd say one of your first steps would be to find out what format these images are in.
I used a SAX Content Handler to pull the base 64 image data out of the XML into a String, and then converted the Base 64 String into a byte array. From there I could either simply write the byte array to a file, or if I wanted use ImageIO to create an Image object, work with the metadata or even save it in a different format, though I never actually did that.
Anyway, here is some code I whipped up to convert the String to a byte array, then write the byte array to disk. Let us know how you get along!
      * Writes a byte array to a file.
      * @param result          String containing base64 image data     
      * @param fileName     File name to write the converted image to
     public static void writeTiff(byte[] result, String fileName) throws IOException {          
          FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream(fileName, true);
          out.write(result);
          out.close();
      * Converts a String of base 64 image data, captured from XML, into a byte array.
      * @param      image     A Base 64 String          
      * @return      byte[]          
     public static byte[] convertTiff(String image) throws IOException {          
          byte[] result = new sun.misc.BASE64Decoder().decodeBuffer(image);
          return result;
     }