Apache Tika BodyContentHandler() is Empty - apache-tika

Question

I'm using Apache Tika 1.18 and when I use one web service framework (sparkjava), the code below works. Yet in SpringBoot, the BodyContentHandler() line of code is empty. Thus, my returned text is empty.
Not sure what's up with this but would appreciate any suggestions.
I'm passing a Base64 encoded string to this code and it's also URLEncoded. Thus, the two decodes as the first two lines.
Running this code in the debugger in SpringBoot, the variable contents have the same values as in sparkjava, but once I get to the BodyContentHandler(), instead of having the input text as the sparkjava version has for the handler variable, the SpringBoot version has "" for handler.
I also tested this behavior with Tika 1.17. Same. Also tried removing the -1 parameter from the new BodyContentHandler() constructor. Same.
Thanks in advance.
String "data=" passed into SpringBoot POST method.
String bodyData = URLDecoder.decode(data.substring(data.indexOf("data=") + 5));
byte[] decodedBodyData = java.util.Base64.getMimeDecoder().decode(bodyData);
Tika tika = new Tika();
try
{
Parser parser = new AutoDetectParser();
// line of code below returns "". Problem!
BodyContentHandler handler = new BodyContentHandler(-1); // handle larger files.
Metadata metadata = new Metadata();
InputStream inputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(decodedBodyData);
ParseContext context = new ParseContext();
//parsing the file
parser.parse(inputStream, handler, metadata, context);
textToReturn = handler.toString();
}
catch (IOException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
catch (SAXException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
catch (TikaException e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
e.printStackTrace();
}