I/O : Java Glossary

by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products
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I/O

Java has a bewildering array of I/O (input/output) routines. Many you can cascade together like Lego blocks to create variants. Have a look at this essay on JDK 1.0.2 candidate methods or this essay on JDK 1.1 candidate methods for the task at hand. The JDK 1.1 essay also shows suggested classes to use when upgrading deprecated JDK 1.0.2 methods.
I have also written an amanuensis Applet in Java, available with source code, to automatically generate Java source code for various combinations of file type and data type. You can just experiment to learn from complete examples, or you can cut and paste the code into your own applications.
The File I/O Amanuensis generates sample Java source code to read or write the console, a sequential file, a random access file, a String, an array of characters, an array of bytes, URL, HTTP CGI GET/POST, Socket or Pipe. You can use them buffered, unbuffered or GZIP compressed. Java works with seven types of data in your files:

7 or 8-bit ASCII characters (plain or locale-encoded)
UTF 8-bit Unicode compressed character encoding.
binary format
16-bit Unicode characters
Java binary format — platform independent big-endian binary representations. Have a look at this essay to see how DataOutputStream formats each of the primitive data types.
Little-endian binary format.
raw bytes
persistent serialised objects

Java is missing basic input routines. You have to roll your own with java.util.StringTokenizer, java.io.StreamTokenizer or readLine to split the input up into strings, then use various conversion methods to convert to float, int etc.

binary format
conversion
encoding
endian
File
File I/O Amanuensis
println format
serialiization

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