Special Edition Using Java 2 Standard Edition

Using Readers and Writers

Now it's time to talk about the character stream classes that are present in the java.io package. If you remember from the previous discussion, these are used for 16-bit Unicode characters. The abstract base classes of all the Reader and Writer classes are, not sur prisingly, java.io.Reader and java.io.Writer.

These classes have the default behavior to read and write 16-bit character streams. There are similarities between the types of subclasses available underneath the byte stream super class and the subclasses available under the character stream super class. So, you should be able to do exactly the same types of things with character streams that you can do with byte streams. With character streams, however, ...