Java I/O

Filtered Readers and Writers

The java.io.FilterReader and java.io.FilterWriter classes are abstract classes that read characters and filter them in some way before passing the text along. You can imagine a FilterReader that converts all characters to uppercase.

public abstract class FilterReader extends Reader 
public abstract class FilterWriter extends Writer

Although FilterReader and FilterWriter are modeled after java.io.FilterInputStream and java.io.FilterOutputStream, they are much less commonly used than those classes. There are no concrete subclasses of FilterWriter in the java packages and only one concrete subclass of FilterReader (PushbackReader discussed later). These classes exist so you can write your own filters.

The FilterReader Class

FilterReader has a single constructor, which is protected:

protected FilterReader(Reader in)

The in argument is the Reader to which this filter is chained. This reference is stored in a protected field called in from which text for this filter is read and is null after the filter has been closed.

protected Reader in

Since FilterReader is an abstract class, only subclasses may be instantiated. Therefore, it doesn’t matter that the constructor is protected, since it may only be invoked from subclass constructors.

FilterReader provides the usual collection of read(), skip(), ready(), markSupported(), mark(), reset(), and close() methods:

public int read() throws IOException public int read(char[] text, int offset, int length) throws IOException ...