Sun Certification Training Guide (310-025, 310-027): Java™ 2 Programmer and Developer Exams

The Reader and Writer Classes

The Reader and Writer classes are abstract classes, at the top of a class hierarchy, that support the reading and writing of Unicode character streams. These classes were introduced with Java 1.1.

The Reader Class

The Reader class supports the standard read(), reset(), skip(), mark(), markSupported(), and close() methods. In addition to these, the ready() method returns a boolean value that indicates whether the next read operation will succeed without blocking.

The direct subclasses of the Reader class are BufferedReader, CharArrayReader, FilterReader, InputStreamReader, PipedReader, and StringReader.

The Writer Class

The Writer class is the output complement to the Reader class. It declares the write(), flush() ...