Output Streams, Writers, and Encodings
Most of the time you don't want to dump an XML document to System.out. Instead you want to write it in a file or onto a network socket. You might even store it in a string and pass it to some other process. What connects all of these possible targets in Java is the java.io.OutputStream class. Files, sockets, and even strings can all be treated as just another kind of stream.
XML documents are text, and that text is made up of Unicode characters. When the Unicode characters are actually written onto a stream, you need to pick a character encoding that specifies how each character is converted into bytes. This encoding can be one of the Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 or UTF-16, or it can be a local code page ...
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