Equivalent of Perl's 'pack' function in Java

Question

In Perl, I have the following line of code:

pack( "C (N)$cnt", $cnt , @items);

I'm having issues transposing this to Java. How can I do it?

Answer 1

My Perl is pretty rusty but after looking at man perlfunc I think this may be what you want:

List<Integer> items = ...;
ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
DataOutputStream stream = new DataOutputStream(baos);
stream.write(items.size());
for (Integer item : items) {
    stream.writeInt(item);
}
stream.flush(); // not sure this is strictly necessary
byte[] result = baos.toByteArray();