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();
}

为了完整起见，这里是Java 9解决方案：

public static String toString(InputStream input) throws IOException {
    return new String(input.readAllBytes(), StandardCharsets.UTF_8);
}

这使用添加到Java9中的readAllBytes方法。

我建议使用StringWriter类来解决这个问题。

StringWriter wt= new StringWriter();
IOUtils.copy(inputStream, wt, encoding);
String st= wt.toString();

InputStream is = Context.openFileInput(someFileName); // whatever format you have

ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

byte[] b = new byte[8192];
for (int bytesRead; (bytesRead = is.read(b)) != -1;) {
    bos.write(b, 0, bytesRead);
}

String output = bos.toString(someEncoding);

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"))

Use:

import java.io.BufferedInputStream;
import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.IOException;

public static String readInputStreamAsString(InputStream in)
    throws IOException {

    BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(in);
    ByteArrayOutputStream buf = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    int result = bis.read();
    while(result != -1) {
      byte b = (byte)result;
      buf.write(b);
      result = bis.read();
    }
    return buf.toString();
}