Just Java™ 2

Output

At last we're at the point where we'll talk about one of the major confusions in Java I/O, use of char (double byte) versus single byte I/O.

Readers versus OutputStreams

Originally, Java only had stream classes, and the streams only operated on bytes of data. However, characters in Java are two bytes wide, and byte-oriented I/O did not properly cope with internationalization.

So a wider type of stream was introduced in JDK 1.1 specifically for character-based I/O. Reader classes are able to get Unicode character input two bytes at a time. Writer classes are able to do Unicode character output two bytes at a time, as shown in Figure 17-2. Input and output streams operate on data one byte at a time.

Figure 17-2. Your program outputs ...