Removing extra "empty" characters from byte array and converting to a string

Question

I was working on this for a while and did not find anything about this on here, so I thought I would post my solution for criticism/usefulness.

import java.lang.*;
public class Concat
{    
    public static void main(String[] args)
    {
        byte[] buf = new byte[256];
        int lastGoodChar=0;

        //fill it up for example only
        byte[] fillbuf=(new String("hello").getBytes());
        for(int i=0;i<fillbuf.length;i++) 
                buf[i]=fillbuf[i];

        //Now remove extra bytes from "buf"
        for(int i=0;i<buf.length;i++)
        {
                int bint = new Byte(buf[i]).intValue();
                if(bint == 0)
                {
                     lastGoodChar = i;
                     break;
                }
        }

        String bufString = new String(buf,0,lastGoodChar);
        //Prove that it has been concatenated, 0 if exact match
        System.out.println( bufString.compareTo("hello"));
    }    
}

Solution

I believe this does the same thing:

String emptyRemoved = "he\u0000llo\u0000".replaceAll("\u0000.*", "");

Comments

[Mark Peters]

I'm calling this not a real question because you posted a solution in the question, basically asking for answers to be questions/criticism. If you want to explore the best way of doing something, properly define the requirements as a question and then post an answer to your own question. That way we can up/down vote it or suggest things in the comments.

[user460880]

Yeah, sorry. This wasn't meant to ask a question as much as it was to share code. Which I find to often lead to much more constructive criticism. And, being a non-CS person, find that it helps when you don't know how to communicate what you want to do.

[user460880]

Awesome, thanks. I figured out how to replace the second "for" loop using your suggestion. But it does require first properly decoding the byte array by specifying a proper charset.

[cesards]

Or adding: new String(content, 0, totalBytesRead, "ISO-8859-1"); I think it does the same!