Ivor Horton's Beginning Java™ 2, JDK™ 5th Edition

8.5. Summary

In this chapter, I have introduced the facilities for inputting and outputting basic types of data to a stream. The important points I have discussed include the following:

• A stream is an abstract representation of a source of serial input or a destination for serial output.

• The classes supporting stream operations are contained in the package java.io.

• Two kinds of stream operations are supported: binary stream operations will result in streams that contain bytes, and character stream operations are for streams that contain characters in the local machine character encoding.

• No conversion occurs when characters are written to, or read from, a byte stream. Characters are converted from Unicode to the local machine representation of characters when a character stream is written.

• Byte streams are represented by subclasses of the classes InputStream and OutputStream.

• Character stream operations are provided by subclasses of the Reader and Writer classes.

• The printf() method that is defined in the PrintStream and PrintWriter classes formats an arbitrary number of argument values according to a format string that you supply. You can use this method for the System.out object to produce formatted output to the command line.

• The static format() method that is defined in the String class will format an arbitrary number of argument values according to a format string that you supply and return the result as a String object. This method works in essentially the same way as the printf() ...