Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

15.7.2 Interfaces and Classes for Character-Based Input and Output

In addition to the byte-based streams, Java provides the Reader and Writer abstract classes, which are character-based streams like those you used for text-file processing in Section 15.4. Most of the byte-based streams have corresponding character-based concrete Reader or Writer classes.

Character-Based Buffering Readers and Writers

Classes BufferedReader (a subclass of abstract class Reader) and BufferedWriter (a subclass of abstract class Writer) enable buffering for character-based streams. Remember that character-based streams use Unicode characters—such streams can process data in any language that the Unicode character set represents.

Memory-Based char Array Reader ...