An actual plain text serializer?

[Bill van Melle]

I noticed that one of the implementations of Serializer<T> is the curiously
named PlainTextSerializer, which apparently returns a Document!  I'm trying
to imagine what that would be (I couldn't find any (ahem) documentation of
Document other than the rather unhelpful javadoc), but meanwhile, what if I
really did want to read a web result as plain text?  Am I supposed to
use ByteArraySerializer and then convert it to a String?  Not particularly
hard, I suppose -- in fact, it's trivial to write my own StringSerializer
that uses ByteArraySerializer internally.  I was just wondering why I should
be the one to do that :).


public class StringSerializer implements Serializer<String> {

    private String encoding = "UTF8";

    public StringSerializer() {
    }

    public StringSerializer(String encoding) {
        this.encoding = encoding;
    }

    @Override
    public String getMIMEType(String object) {
        return "text/plain";
    }

    @Override
    public String readObject(InputStream inputStream)
            throws IOException, SerializationException {
        byte[] bytes = new ByteArraySerializer().readObject(inputStream);
        return new String(bytes, encoding);
    }

    @Override
    public void writeObject(String object, OutputStream outputStream)
            throws IOException, SerializationException {
        byte[] bytes = object.getBytes(encoding);
        new ByteArraySerializer().writeObject(bytes, outputStream);
    }

}