Get Retrofit response as String

Since I first created this post Retrofit and OkHttp have changed a lot. Now in version 2 is much easier to get a String response from your server. All this methods can be seen on Retrofit CallTest class, but I’ll write them down anyway.

Method 1

Get the String straight from the response body. Clean and easy:

interface Service {
    @GET("/") Call<ResponseBody> getBody();
}

// Nothing to add in your builder
Retrofit retrofit = new Retrofit.Builder()  
        .baseUrl(server.url("/"))
        .build();
Service example = retrofit.create(Service.class);

// get your response, sync or async
Response<ResponseBody> response = example.getBody().execute();
// get the damn string!
response.body().string()

Method 2 (preferred)

Retrofit launched a ScalarConverter that makes it really easy. You just need to add it to your Retrofit builder and you are good to go.

interface Service {
    @GET("/") Call<String> getString();
}

// Use it in your Retrofit  builder
Retrofit retrofit = new Retrofit.Builder()
        .baseUrl(server.url("/"))
        .addConverterFactory(GsonConverterFactory.create()) // This is to use GSON for JSON
        .addConverterFactory(ScalarsConverterFactory.create()) // This gets your String
        .build();
Service example = retrofit.create(Service.class);

// get your response, sync or async, already as a String
Response<String> response = example.getString().execute();
// get the body
response.body()

Original post (Retrofit 1.9):

Not all APIs always respond with JSON. Sometimes you just want a simple response with a text. And when using Retrofit this can be tough. Retrofit always uses GSON (or another converter you decide) to parse the Response. So, if you try to get a Response as String, your code will throw some exceptions regarding tokens and blablabla. One way to not parse the response is to get the Response object.

The problem is that the Response#getBody doesn’t return a String, but a TypedInput. And if you try to use toString, the method will not really return the response. So, how you can get only the response, as a String?

Looking at the Retrofit code you can see that TypedInput is an Interface and you can cast it to TypedByteArray so you can see the byte[] inside the response. With this, you can create a new String from the bytes and have your String response, yey!

new String(((TypedByteArray) response.getBody()).getBytes());