Delphi Cookbook

I/O in the twenty-first century – knowing streams

Many of the I/O related activities handle streams of data. A stream is a sequence of data elements made available over time. According to Wikipedia:

A stream can be thought of as a conveyor belt that allows items to be processed one at a time rather than in large batches.

At the lowest level, all the streams are bytes, but using a high-level interface could obviously help the programmer to handle his data. This is the reason why a stream object usually has methods such as read, seek, write, and many more, just to make the handling of byte stream a bit simpler.

In this recipe, we'll see some streams utilization examples.

Getting ready

In the good old Pascal days, there was a set of functions to handle ...