My name
is
Jon Skeet

error while returning byte array

I am using the below code

 public byte[] encrypt(byte[] unencryptedString,String k)throws Exception {
    String encryptedString = null;

    String k1 = String.format("%024d", Integer.parseInt(k));
    myEncryptionKey = k1;
    myEncryptionScheme = DESEDE_ENCRYPTION_SCHEME;
    arrayBytes = myEncryptionKey.getBytes(UNICODE_FORMAT);
    ks = new DESedeKeySpec(arrayBytes);
    skf = SecretKeyFactory.getInstance(myEncryptionScheme);
    cipher = Cipher.getInstance(myEncryptionScheme);
    key = skf.generateSecret(ks);

    try {
        cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key);
        byte[] plainText =
                unencryptedString/*.getBytes(UNICODE_FORMAT)*/;
        byte[] encryptedText = cipher.doFinal(plainText);
       // encryptedString = new String(Base64.encodeBase64(encryptedText));
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return encryptedText;
}

The return statement gives the following error:

encryptedText cannot be resolved to a variable

Contrary to the other answers, I wouldn't change your code to return null if you fail to encrypt the text - I would let that failure bubble up as an exception. I wouldn't declare that your method can throw Exception either - I'd specify which exceptions it can throw. You could do this at a very fine-grained level, or in this case use GeneralSecurityException which covers all the crypto-specific exceptions you're interested in.

I'd further stop using fields unnecessarily - you don't need to change any state here.

After all this refactoring, your method would become:

public static byte[] encrypt(String unencryptedString, String k)
    throws GeneralSecurityException {
    String keySpecText = String.format("%024d", Integer.parseInt(k));
    byte[] keySpecBytes = keySpecText.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_16);
    KeySpec ks = new DESedeKeySpec(keySpecBytes);
    SecretKeyFactory skf = SecretKeyFactory.getInstance(DESEDE_ENCRYPTION_SCHEME);
    Key key = skf.generateSecret(ks);
    Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance(DESEDE_ENCRYPTION_SCHEME);
    cipher.init(Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE, key);
    byte[] plainText = unencryptedString.getBytes(StandardCharsets.UTF_16);
    return cipher.doFinal(plainText);
}

I'm not at all sure that this is a good way of providing a key - you're limited to 2³² keys here, which isn't great, and even if you're happy with that, why take a string for the key instead of an int? But at least the code compiles, and when it fails it will properly fail.

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