Pro C# 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform, Fifth Edition

20.9. Working with StreamWriters and StreamReaders

The StreamWriter and StreamReader classes are useful whenever you need to read or write character-based data (e.g., strings). Both of these types work by default with Unicode characters; however, you can change this by supplying a properly configured System.Text.Encoding object reference. To keep things simple, assume that the default Unicode encoding fits the bill.

StreamReader derives from an abstract type named TextReader, as does the related StringReader type (discussed later in this chapter). The TextReader base class provides a limited set of functionality to each of these descendents; specifically it provides the ability to read and peek into a character stream.

The StreamWriter type ...