Java, A Beginner's Guide, 5th Edition, 5th Edition

Reading and Writing Binary Data

So far, we have just been reading and writing bytes containing ASCII characters, but it is possible—indeed, common—to read and write other types of data. For example, you might want to create a file that contains ints, doubles, or shorts. To read and write binary values of the Java primitive types, you will use DataInputStream and DataOutputStream.

DataOutputStream implements the DataOutput interface. This interface defines methods that write all of Java’s primitive types to a file. It is important to understand that this data is written using its internal, binary format, not its human-readable text form. Several commonly used output methods for Java’s primitive types are shown in Table 10-5. Each throws an IOException ...