Byte Array To String Conversion Inconsistency - arrays

Question

I am testing out AES encryption on android and i need to convert the encrypted text to a string so as to store it in my firebase database. I managed to do so sucessfully. The problem comes when I try to retrieve the string from the database and convert it back to a byte array for decryption.
The retreived string is identical to the string sent to the database but when i convert it to a byte array and compare the two values, they are different as seen in the code sample below. I even made sure to use the same Charset but this did not fix the issue.
val encryptedPair: Pair<ByteArray,ByteArray> = encrypt("text")
val enc: MutableMap<String, Any> = HashMap()
enc["ciphertext"] = encryptedPair.second.toString(Charsets.UTF_8).trim()
fireStoreDatabase.collection("enc").document("test").set(enc)
.addOnSuccessListener {
fireStoreDatabase.collection("enc").document("test").get()
.addOnSuccessListener { doc->
//The below if condition prints out encrytion method: diff
if(encryptedPair.second.contentEquals(doc.getString("password")!!.toByteArray(Charsets.UTF_8)))
Log.e("encryption method: ","same")
else
Log.e("encryption method: ","diff")
}
}
This difference leads to the decryption process failing. Note that when i try to encrypt and decrypt with the values locally, it works as expected. So i know the problem is with the byte array i get from firebase.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Answer 1

As Jon Skeet has suggested, using
val enc: MutableMap<String, Any> = HashMap()
enc["ciphertext"] = Blob.fromBytes(encryptedPair.second)
fireStoreDatabase.collection("enc").document("test").set(enc)
to save the data to firebase and then retrieving it with:
doc.getBlob("ciphertext")!!.toBytes())
worked as expected.