How to avoid outputting carriage-returns in Java?

Question

I have written a program to encrypt text in Java. It works fine for the most part.

Short strings encrypt and decrypt just fine.

However, if I input more than a few words, the encrypted text output to the console contains carriage-returns. Any ideas on what might be going on?

If I paste the output into notepad, and remove the returns, and then decrypt it with my program, it returns the originally input text as expected.

I have included most of the code, because I haven't any idea where the error is occurring.

import java.io.IOException;
import java.security.InvalidKeyException;
import java.security.Key;
import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
import java.util.Scanner;

import javax.crypto.BadPaddingException;
import javax.crypto.Cipher;
import javax.crypto.IllegalBlockSizeException;
import javax.crypto.NoSuchPaddingException;
import javax.crypto.spec.SecretKeySpec;

import sun.misc.BASE64Encoder;
import sun.misc.BASE64Decoder;

public class Application
{
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        Scanner input = new Scanner(System.in);
        String textToEncrypt = "Hello World";
        String textToDecrypt;
        String textToDecryptAscii;
        String result;
        int operation;
        Cipher cipher = null;
        try {
            cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES");
        } catch (NoSuchAlgorithmException e1) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e1.printStackTrace();
        } catch (NoSuchPaddingException e1) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e1.printStackTrace();
        }
        String key = "Baw12345Baw12345"; // 128 bit key

        BASE64Encoder asciiEncoder = new BASE64Encoder();
        BASE64Decoder asciiDecoder = new BASE64Decoder();

        System.out.printf("Enter:\n1 for encryption\n2 for decryption\n\nChoice: ");
        operation = input.nextInt();
        input.nextLine();

        if (operation == 1)
        {
            try 
            {
                System.out.printf("\n---------\n\nText to encrypt: ");
                textToEncrypt = input.nextLine();

                //Create key and cipher
                Key aesKey = new SecretKeySpec(key.getBytes(), "AES");
                //Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance("AES");

                //encrypt the text
                cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, aesKey);
                byte[] encrypted = cipher.doFinal(textToEncrypt.getBytes());

                StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
                for (byte b: encrypted)
                {
                    sb.append((char)b);
                }

                // the encrypted String
                String enc = sb.toString();
                //System.out.println("encrypted:" + enc);

                String asciiEncodedEncryptedResult = asciiEncoder.encodeBuffer(enc.getBytes());
                System.out.println("Encrypted text: " + asciiEncodedEncryptedResult);
                //System.out.printf("\n------------------------------\nDecrypted text: " + asciiEncodedEncryptedResult + "\n------------------------------\n\n\n");

            }
            catch(Exception e) 
            {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
        else if (operation == 2)
        {
            System.out.printf("\n---------\n\nText to decrypt: ");
            textToDecryptAscii = input.nextLine();

            byte[] decodedBytes = null;
            try
            {
                decodedBytes = asciiDecoder.decodeBuffer(textToDecryptAscii);
            } catch (IOException e1) {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e1.printStackTrace();
            }
            //System.out.println("decodedBytes " + new String(decodedBytes));

            textToDecrypt = new String(decodedBytes);

            //Convert the string to byte array
            //for decryption
            byte[] bb = new byte[textToDecrypt.length()];
            for (int i=0; i<textToDecrypt.length(); i++)
            {
                bb[i] = (byte) textToDecrypt.charAt(i);
            }

            //decrypt the text
            Key aesKey = new SecretKeySpec(key.getBytes(), "AES");
            try
            {
                cipher.init(Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE, aesKey);
            }
            catch (InvalidKeyException e) {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            String decrypted = null;
            try
            {
                decrypted = new String(cipher.doFinal(bb));
            }
            catch (IllegalBlockSizeException e) {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            catch (BadPaddingException e) {
                // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
            System.out.printf("\n------------------------------\nDecrypted text: " + decrypted + "\n------------------------------\n\n\n");
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Your asciiEncoder (which is actually base64), will automatically add new line characters as part of how base64 works. You can remove this functionality in some implementations by something similar to this:

asciiEncoder.linelength = 0;

Additionally, you could just remove the newlines from the resulting string by replacing them with nothing.