Java Reference
In-Depth Information
20.3. Character Streams
The abstract classes for reading and writing streams of characters are
Reader
and
Writer
. Each supports methods similar to those of its byte
stream counterpart
InputStream
and
OutputStream
, respectively. For ex-
ample,
InputStream
has a
read
method that returns a
byte
as the lowest
8 bits of an
int
, and
Reader
has a
read
method that returns a
char
as
the lowest 16 bits of an
int
. And where
OutputStream
has methods that
write
byte
arrays,
Writer
has methods that write
char
arrays. The charac-
ter streams were designed after the byte streams to provide full support
for working with Unicode characters, and in the process the contracts of
the classes were improved to make them easier to work with. The type
tree for the character streams of
java.io
appears in
Figure 20-2
.
