这个问题的解决方案不是最简单的，但由于没有提到NIO流和通道，这里有一个使用NIO通道和ByteBuffer将流转换为字符串的版本。

public static String streamToStringChannel(InputStream in, String encoding, int bufSize) throws IOException {
    ReadableByteChannel channel = Channels.newChannel(in);
    ByteBuffer byteBuffer = ByteBuffer.allocate(bufSize);
    ByteArrayOutputStream bout = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    WritableByteChannel outChannel = Channels.newChannel(bout);
    while (channel.read(byteBuffer) > 0 || byteBuffer.position() > 0) {
        byteBuffer.flip();  //make buffer ready for write
        outChannel.write(byteBuffer);
        byteBuffer.compact(); //make buffer ready for reading
    }
    channel.close();
    outChannel.close();
    return bout.toString(encoding);
}

下面是如何使用它的示例：

try (InputStream in = new FileInputStream("/tmp/large_file.xml")) {
    String x = streamToStringChannel(in, "UTF-8", 1);
    System.out.println(x);
}

对于大型文件，此方法的性能应该很好。

如果您正在使用Google Collections/Guava，您可以执行以下操作：

InputStream stream = ...
String content = CharStreams.toString(new InputStreamReader(stream, Charsets.UTF_8));
Closeables.closeQuietly(stream);

请注意，InputStreamReader的第二个参数（即Charsets.UTF_8）不是必需的，但如果您知道编码（您应该这样做！）

异-8859-1

如果您知道输入流的编码是ISO-8859-1或ASCII，这里有一种非常高效的方法来实现这一点。它（1）避免了StringWriter的内部StringBuffer中存在的不必要的同步，（2）避免了InputStreamReader的开销，（3）最小化了必须复制StringBuilder的内部字符数组的次数。

public static String iso_8859_1(InputStream is) throws IOException {
    StringBuilder chars = new StringBuilder(Math.max(is.available(), 4096));
    byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
    int n;
    while ((n = is.read(buffer)) != -1) {
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
            chars.append((char)(buffer[i] & 0xFF));
        }
    }
    return chars.toString();
}

UTF-8型

对于使用UTF-8编码的流，可以使用相同的通用策略：

public static String utf8(InputStream is) throws IOException {
    StringBuilder chars = new StringBuilder(Math.max(is.available(), 4096));
    byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
    int n;
    int state = 0;
    while ((n = is.read(buffer)) != -1) {
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
            if ((state = nextStateUtf8(state, buffer[i])) >= 0) {
                chars.appendCodePoint(state);
            } else if (state == -1) { //error
                state = 0;
                chars.append('\uFFFD'); //replacement char
            }
        }
    }
    return chars.toString();
}

其中nextStateUtf8（）函数定义如下：

/**
 * Returns the next UTF-8 state given the next byte of input and the current state.
 * If the input byte is the last byte in a valid UTF-8 byte sequence,
 * the returned state will be the corresponding unicode character (in the range of 0 through 0x10FFFF).
 * Otherwise, a negative integer is returned. A state of -1 is returned whenever an
 * invalid UTF-8 byte sequence is detected.
 */
static int nextStateUtf8(int currentState, byte nextByte) {
    switch (currentState & 0xF0000000) {
        case 0:
            if ((nextByte & 0x80) == 0) { //0 trailing bytes (ASCII)
                return nextByte;
            } else if ((nextByte & 0xE0) == 0xC0) { //1 trailing byte
                if (nextByte == (byte) 0xC0 || nextByte == (byte) 0xC1) { //0xCO & 0xC1 are overlong
                    return -1;
                } else {
                    return nextByte & 0xC000001F;
                }
            } else if ((nextByte & 0xF0) == 0xE0) { //2 trailing bytes
                if (nextByte == (byte) 0xE0) { //possibly overlong
                    return nextByte & 0xA000000F;
                } else if (nextByte == (byte) 0xED) { //possibly surrogate
                    return nextByte & 0xB000000F;
                } else {
                    return nextByte & 0x9000000F;
                }
            } else if ((nextByte & 0xFC) == 0xF0) { //3 trailing bytes
                if (nextByte == (byte) 0xF0) { //possibly overlong
                    return nextByte & 0x80000007;
                } else {
                    return nextByte & 0xE0000007;
                }
            } else if (nextByte == (byte) 0xF4) { //3 trailing bytes, possibly undefined
                return nextByte & 0xD0000007;
            } else {
                return -1;
            }
        case 0xE0000000: //3rd-to-last continuation byte
            return (nextByte & 0xC0) == 0x80 ? currentState << 6 | nextByte & 0x9000003F : -1;
        case 0x80000000: //3rd-to-last continuation byte, check overlong
            return (nextByte & 0xE0) == 0xA0 || (nextByte & 0xF0) == 0x90 ? currentState << 6 | nextByte & 0x9000003F : -1;
        case 0xD0000000: //3rd-to-last continuation byte, check undefined
            return (nextByte & 0xF0) == 0x80 ? currentState << 6 | nextByte & 0x9000003F : -1;
        case 0x90000000: //2nd-to-last continuation byte
            return (nextByte & 0xC0) == 0x80 ? currentState << 6 | nextByte & 0xC000003F : -1;
        case 0xA0000000: //2nd-to-last continuation byte, check overlong
            return (nextByte & 0xE0) == 0xA0 ? currentState << 6 | nextByte & 0xC000003F : -1;
        case 0xB0000000: //2nd-to-last continuation byte, check surrogate
            return (nextByte & 0xE0) == 0x80 ? currentState << 6 | nextByte & 0xC000003F : -1;
        case 0xC0000000: //last continuation byte
            return (nextByte & 0xC0) == 0x80 ? currentState << 6 | nextByte & 0x3F : -1;
        default:
            return -1;
    }
}

自动检测编码

如果您的输入流是使用ASCII、ISO-8859-1或UTF-8编码的，但您不确定是哪一种，我们可以使用与上一种方法类似的方法，但使用额外的编码检测组件在返回字符串之前自动检测编码。

public static String autoDetect(InputStream is) throws IOException {
    StringBuilder chars = new StringBuilder(Math.max(is.available(), 4096));
    byte[] buffer = new byte[4096];
    int n;
    int state = 0;
    boolean ascii = true;
    while ((n = is.read(buffer)) != -1) {
        for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) {
            if ((state = nextStateUtf8(state, buffer[i])) > 0x7F)
                ascii = false;
            chars.append((char)(buffer[i] & 0xFF));
        }
    }

    if (ascii || state < 0) { //probably not UTF-8
        return chars.toString();
    }
    //probably UTF-8
    int pos = 0;
    char[] charBuf = new char[2];
    for (int i = 0, len = chars.length(); i < len; i++) {
        if ((state = nextStateUtf8(state, (byte)chars.charAt(i))) >= 0) {
            boolean hi = Character.toChars(state, charBuf, 0) == 2;
            chars.setCharAt(pos++, charBuf[0]);
            if (hi) {
                chars.setCharAt(pos++, charBuf[1]);
            }
        }
    }
    return chars.substring(0, pos);
}

如果您的输入流的编码既不是ISO-8859-1，也不是ASCII，也不是UTF-8，那么我就遵从已经存在的其他答案。

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();
}

与Okio一起：

String result = Okio.buffer(Okio.source(inputStream)).readUtf8();

使用java 9中支持的java.io.InputStream.transferTo（OutputStream）和ByteArrayOutputStream.toString（String），该字符串采用字符集名称：

public static String gobble(InputStream in, String charsetName) throws IOException {
    ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
    in.transferTo(bos);
    return bos.toString(charsetName);
}