Creating a Zip file from a Stream

Given an InputStream generated for me, i wanted to zip it up and email it. From the java almanac i saw that i could easily do this if i write the stream to disk first. But this seemed like an unnecesary step for me. All i needed to do was to attach this outputstream to my email code and get it done. So, after a bit of playing, I got it working. Here is the code:

   1: private byte[] createZipFile(InputStream in, String fileName) throws IOException {

   2:         ByteArrayOutputStream zipOutputStream = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

   3:         ZipOutputStream zippedFile = new ZipOutputStream(zipOutputStream);

   4:         byte[] buf = new byte[1024];

   5:         zippedFile.putNextEntry(new ZipEntry(myFileName));

   6:         // Transfer bytes from the file to the ZIP file

   7:         int len;

   8:         BufferedInputStream bs = new BufferedInputStream(bds[0].getInputStream());

   9:         while ((len = bs.read(buf)) > 0) {

  10:             zippedFile.write(buf, 0, len);

  11:         }

  12:         zippedFile.closeEntry();

  13:         bs.close();        

  14:         zippedFile.close();

  15:         return zipOutputStream.toByteArray();

  16: } 

By wrapping the ZipOutputStream around a ByteArrayOutputStream, i am able to access the byte array and use that to attach to my email and send out.