Do I need to close the input stream manually after using IOUtils.toString(input) of commons-io?

Question

Commons-IO has an IOUtils.toString(inputStream) method, which can read all content from an input stream:

InputStream input = getInputStream();
String content = IOUtils.toString(input);

My question is shall I close the input stream manually after using it?

I thought IOUtils may close it since it has read all the content, but I can't find that in the source code.

Solution

The javadoc says:

Wherever possible, the methods in this class do not flush or close the stream. This is to avoid making non-portable assumptions about the streams' origin and further use. Thus the caller is still responsible for closing streams after use.

Comments

[Sotirios Delimanolis]

This is the conventional pattern for stream based libraries. The client should handle it.

[Freewind]

Thank you, but I found I never need to do other operations on the input stream when I reading the content by IOUtils.toString, except closing it ...

[Daniel Hári]

for files you can use FileUtils.readFileToString() that closes the stream