What is the Difference between byte stream and Character streams?

Question

Give an example of each.

Answer 1

Byte Streams
A byte stream access the file byte by byte. Java programs use byte streams to perform input and output of 8-bit bytes. It is suitable for any kind of file, however not quite appropriate for text files. For example, if the file is using a unicode encoding and a character is represented with two bytes, the byte stream will treat these separately and you will need to do the conversion yourself. Byte oriented streams do not use any encoding scheme while Character oriented streams use character encoding scheme(UNICODE). All byte stream classes are descended from InputStream and OutputStream .

import java.io.*;
public class TestClass{
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    FileInputStream fis = null;
    FileOutputStream fos = null;
    try {
      fis = new FileInputStream("in.txt");
      fos = new FileOutputStream ("out.txt");
      int temp;
      while ((temp = fis.read()) != -1) //read byte by byte
      fos.write((byte)temp);        //write byte by byte
      if (fis != null)
      fis.close();
      if (fos != null)
      fos.close();
    }catch(Exception e){
      System.out.println(e);
    }
  }
}

Character Streams
A character stream will read a file character by character. Character Stream is a higher level concept than Byte Stream . A Character Stream is, effectively, a Byte Stream that has been wrapped with logic that allows it to output characters from a specific encoding. That means, a character stream needs to be given the file's encoding in order to work properly. Character stream can support all types of character sets ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8, UTF-16 etc. All character stream classes are descended from Reader and Writer .

Example

import java.io.*;
public class TestClass{
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    FileReader reader = null;
    try {
      reader = new FileReader("in.txt");
      int fChar;
      while ((fChar = reader.read()) != -1) //read char by char
        System.out.println((char)fChar);          //write char by char
    }catch(Exception e){
      System.out.println(e);
    }
  }
}

Credit: http://net-informations.com/java/cjava/stream.htm

Ling

Answer 2

A stream is a way of sequentially accessing a file. A byte stream access the file byte by byte. A byte stream is suitable for any kind of file, however not quite appropriate for text files. For example, if the file is using a unicode encoding and a character is represented with two bytes, the byte stream will treat these separately and you will need to do the conversion yourself.

A character stream will read a file character by character. A character stream needs to be given the file's encoding in order to work properly.

Although a Microsoft Word Document contains text, it can't be accessed with a character stream (it isn't a text file). You need to use a byte stream to access it.