如果需要将字符串转换为没有外部库的特定字符集，则：

public String convertStreamToString(InputStream is) throws IOException {
  try (ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();) {
    is.transferTo(baos);
    return baos.toString(StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
  }
}

基于已接受的Apache Commons答案的第二部分，但在始终关闭流的情况下填补了一个小缺口：

    String theString;
    try {
        theString = IOUtils.toString(inputStream, encoding);
    } finally {
        IOUtils.closeQuietly(inputStream);
    }

Apache Commons允许：

String myString = IOUtils.toString(myInputStream, "UTF-8");

当然，您可以选择UTF-8以外的其他字符编码。

另请参阅：（文档）

以下是我经过一些实验后提出的最优雅、纯Java（无库）解决方案：

public static String fromStream(InputStream in) throws IOException
{
    BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(in));
    StringBuilder out = new StringBuilder();
    String newLine = System.getProperty("line.separator");
    String line;
    while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
        out.append(line);
        out.append(newLine);
    }
    return out.toString();
}

使用Streams的纯Java解决方案，从Java8开始工作。

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.util.stream.Collectors;

// ...
public static String inputStreamToString(InputStream is) throws IOException {
    try (BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is))) {
        return br.lines().collect(Collectors.joining(System.lineSeparator()));
    }
}

正如Christoffer Hammarström在其他答案中提到的那样，明确指定Charset更安全。即InputStreamReader构造函数可以按如下方式更改：

new InputStreamReader(is, Charset.forName("UTF-8"))

如果不能使用Commons IO（FileUtils/IOUtils/CopyUtils），下面是一个使用BufferedReader逐行读取文件的示例：

public class StringFromFile {
    public static void main(String[] args) /*throws UnsupportedEncodingException*/ {
        InputStream is = StringFromFile.class.getResourceAsStream("file.txt");
        BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is/*, "UTF-8"*/));
        final int CHARS_PER_PAGE = 5000; //counting spaces
        StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(CHARS_PER_PAGE);
        try {
            for(String line=br.readLine(); line!=null; line=br.readLine()) {
                builder.append(line);
                builder.append('\n');
            }
        } 
        catch (IOException ignore) { }

        String text = builder.toString();
        System.out.println(text);
    }
}

或者，如果你想要原始速度，我会根据Paul de Vrieze的建议（避免使用StringWriter（内部使用StringBuffer））提出一个变体：

public class StringFromFileFast {
    public static void main(String[] args) /*throws UnsupportedEncodingException*/ {
        InputStream is = StringFromFileFast.class.getResourceAsStream("file.txt");
        InputStreamReader input = new InputStreamReader(is/*, "UTF-8"*/);
        final int CHARS_PER_PAGE = 5000; //counting spaces
        final char[] buffer = new char[CHARS_PER_PAGE];
        StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder(CHARS_PER_PAGE);
        try {
            for(int read = input.read(buffer, 0, buffer.length);
                    read != -1;
                    read = input.read(buffer, 0, buffer.length)) {
                output.append(buffer, 0, read);
            }
        } catch (IOException ignore) { }

        String text = output.toString();
        System.out.println(text);
    }
}