GZIPInputStream to String

To decode bytes from an InputStream, you can use an InputStreamReader. Then, a BufferedReader will allow you to read your stream line by line.

Your code will look like:

ByteArrayInputStream bais = new ByteArrayInputStream(responseBytes);
GZIPInputStream gzis = new GZIPInputStream(bais);
InputStreamReader reader = new InputStreamReader(gzis);
BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(reader);

String readed;
while ((readed = in.readLine()) != null) {
    System.out.println(readed);
}

Use the try-with-resources idiom (which automatically closes any resources opened in try(...) on exit from the block) to make code cleaner.

Use Apache IOUtils to convert inputStream to String using default CharSet.

import org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils;
public static String gzipFileToString(File file) throws IOException {
    try(GZIPInputStream gzipIn = new GZIPInputStream(new FileInputStream(file))) {
        return IOUtils.toString(gzipIn);
    }
}

Use Apache Commons to convert GzipInputStream to byteArray.

import java.io.InputStream;
import java.util.zip.GZIPInputStream;
import org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils;

public static byte[] decompressContent(byte[] pByteArray) throws IOException {
        GZIPInputStream gzipIn = null;
        try {
            gzipIn = new GZIPInputStream(new ByteArrayInputStream(pByteArray));
            return IOUtils.toByteArray(gzipIn);
        } finally {
            if (gzipIn != null) {
                gzipIn.close();
            }
        }

To convert byte array uncompressed content to String, do something like this :

String uncompressedContent = new String(decompressContent(inputStream));

You should rather have obtained the response as an InputStream instead of as byte[]. Then you can ungzip it using GZIPInputStream and read it as character data using InputStreamReader and finally write it as character data into a String using StringWriter.

String body = null;
String charset = "UTF-8"; // You should determine it based on response header.

try (
    InputStream gzippedResponse = response.getInputStream();
    InputStream ungzippedResponse = new GZIPInputStream(gzippedResponse);
    Reader reader = new InputStreamReader(ungzippedResponse, charset);
    Writer writer = new StringWriter();
) {
    char[] buffer = new char[10240];
    for (int length = 0; (length = reader.read(buffer)) > 0;) {
        writer.write(buffer, 0, length);
    }
    body = writer.toString();
}

// ...

See also:

  • Java IO tutorial
  • How to use URLConnecion to fire/handle HTTP requests

If your final intent is to parse the response as HTML, then I strongly recommend to just use a HTML parser for this like Jsoup. It's then as easy as:

String html = Jsoup.connect("http://google.com").get().html();