Is Apache Commons Codec Base64 a drop-in replacement for sun.misc.BASE64?

Question

Background

This is a follow-up question to my original question Migrating from sun.misc.BASE64 to Java 8 java.util.Base64 because someone suggested that the Apache Commons Codec Base64 API is a drop-in replacement to migrate code which uses the sun.misc Base64 APIs.

Question

Is the org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64 a drop-in replacement for the unsupported, internal Java API sun.misc.BASE64Encoder and sun.misc.BASE64Decoder?

Drop-in replacement means that the encoding/decoding results from both implementations (Apache Commons Codec and sun.misc) are equal, thus the they can be used interchangebly.

Ammoniacal

Answer 1

Stuart Marks perfect counter-example answer to my original question shows definitely that for at least one edge case the Java 8 java.util.Base64 MIME Encoder delivers a different result than the unsupported, internal Java API sun.misc.BASE64Encoder.

So let's check that edge case again using the Apache Commons Codec library.

Edge-case test

For the following test I use the sun.misc.BASE64Encoder implementation of OpenJDK 7 and Apache Commons Codec library 1.14.

public class StuartMarksBase64EncodingEdgeCaseTestForApacheCommonsCodec {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        byte[] bytes = new byte[57];
        String enc1 = new sun_misc_jdk7.BASE64Encoder().encode(bytes);
        String enc2 = new String(org.apache.commons.codec.binary.Base64.encodeBase64(bytes));

        System.out.println("enc1 = <" + enc1 + ">");
        System.out.println("enc2 = <" + enc2 + ">");
        System.out.println(enc1.equals(enc2));
    }

}

This then results in the output

enc1 = <AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
>
enc2 = <AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA>
false

Conclusion

Given the test output I conclude that the Apache Commons Codec Base64 API is not a drop-in replacement to migrate code which uses the sun.misc Base64 APIs.

Ammoniacal