JAVA- STREAMS & FILES

Java provides strong but flexible support for I/O related to Files and networks but this tutorial covers very basic functionality related to streams and I/O. We would see most commonly used example one by one:

Byte Streams

Java byte streams are used to perform input and output of 8-bit bytes. Though there are many classes related to byte streams but the most frequently used classes are , FileInputStream andFileOutputStream

Character Streams

Java Byte streams are used to perform input and output of 8-bit bytes, where as Java Characterstreams are used to perform input and output for 16-bit unicode. Though there are many classes related to character streams but the most frequently used classes are , FileReader and FileWriter.. Though internally FileReader uses FileInputStream and FileWriter uses FileOutputStream but here major difference is that FileReader reads two bytes at a time and FileWriter writes two bytes at a time.

Standard Streams

All the programming languages provide support for standard I/O where user's program can take input from a keyboard and then produce output on the computer screen. If you are aware if C or C++ programming languages, then you must be aware of three standard devices STDIN, STDOUT and STDERR. Similar way Java provides following three standard streams

• Standard Input: This is used to feed the data to user's program and usually a keyboard is used as standard input stream and represented as System.in.
• Standard Output: This is used to output the data produced by the user's program and usually a computer screen is used to standard output stream and represented as System.out.
• Standard Error: This is used to output the error data produced by the user's program and usually a computer screen is used to standard error stream and represented as System.err.

Following is a simple program which creates InputStreamReader to read standard input stream until the user types a "q":

import java.io.*;

public class ReadConsole {
   public static void main(String args[]) throws IOException
   {
      InputStreamReader cin = null;

      try {
         cin = new InputStreamReader(System.in);
         System.out.println("Enter characters, 'q' to quit.");
         char c;
         do {
            c = (char) cin.read();
            System.out.print(c);
         } while(c != 'q');
      }finally {
         if (cin != null) {
            cin.close();
         }
      }
   }
}

Reading and Writing Files:

As described earlier, A stream can be defined as a sequence of data. The InputStream is used to read data from a source and the OutputStream is used for writing data to a destination.

Here is a hierarchy of classes to deal with Input and Output streams.