Java’s stream classes are good for streaming sequences of bytes, but

they’re not good for streaming sequences of characters because bytes and

characters are two different things. A byte represents an -bit data item

and a character represents a -bit data item. Also, Java’s char and String

types naturally handle characters instead of bytes. More importantly, byte

streams have no knowledge of character sets and their encodings.

Java provides writer and reader classes to stream characters. They support

character I/O (they work with char instead of byte) and take character

encodings into account. The abstract Writer and Reader classes describe

what it means to be a writer and a reader.

Writer and Reader are subclassed by OutputStreamWriter and

InputStreamReader, which bridge the gap between character and byte

streams. These classes are subclassed by the FileWriter and FileReader

convenience classes, which facilitate writing/reading characters to/from

files. Writer and Reader are also subclassed by BufferedWriter and

BufferedReader, which buffer characters for efficiency.