For encodings consisting of multiple certificates, use generateCertificates when you want to parse a collection of possibly unrelated certificates. Otherwise, use generateCertPath when you want to generate a CertPath (a certificate chain) and subsequently validate it with a CertPathValidator.

A certificate factory for X.509 must return certificates that are an instance of java.security.cert.X509Certificate, and CRLs that are an instance of java.security.cert.X509CRL.

The following example reads a file with Base64 encoded certificates, which are each bounded at the beginning by -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----, and bounded at the end by -----END CERTIFICATE-----. We convert the FileInputStream (which does not support mark and reset) to a BufferedInputStream (which supports those methods), so that each call to generateCertificate consumes only one certificate, and the read position of the input stream is positioned to the next certificate in the file:

 FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(filename);
 BufferedInputStream bis = new BufferedInputStream(fis);

 CertificateFactory cf = CertificateFactory.getInstance("X.509");

 while (bis.available() > 0) {
    Certificate cert = cf.generateCertificate(bis);
    System.out.println(cert.toString());
 }
 

The following example parses a PKCS#7-formatted certificate reply stored in a file and extracts all the certificates from it:

 FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(filename);
 CertificateFactory cf = CertificateFactory.getInstance("X.509");
 Collection c = cf.generateCertificates(fis);
 Iterator i = c.iterator();
 while (i.hasNext()) {
    Certificate cert = (Certificate)i.next();
    System.out.println(cert);
 }