Java For Dummies Quick Reference

Streams (Overview)

A stream is a flow of characters to and from a program. The other end of the stream can be anything that can accept or generate a stream of characters, including a console window, a printer, a file on a disk drive, or even another program.

The two basic types of streams in Java are

Character streams: Character streams read and write text characters that represent strings. You can connect a character stream to a text file to store text data on a hard drive. Typically, text files use special characters called delimiters — such as commas or Tabs — to separate elements of the file.

Binary streams: Binary streams read and write individual bytes that represent primitive data types. You can connect a binary stream to a binary file to store binary data on a hard drive. The contents of binary files make perfect sense to the programs that read and write them, but if you try to open a binary file in a text editor, the file’s contents look like gibberish.

Many of the classes described in this part are designed to facilitate stream I/O. For character streams, these classes are

Reader : An abstract class that the other reader classes extend.

FileReader : Provides basic methods ...