[itistoday]

Still going through the tutorial, I encounter yet another thing that's kinda bugging me. Java streams are seperated into those that read/write bytes, and those that read/write characters (I think).

Why would one want to use say a DataOutputStream instead of a FileWriter? Can someone help me understand when I would want to use which in what situations (and could you include an example that has to do with sockets?).

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by itistoday:
Still going through the tutorial, I encounter yet another thing that's kinda bugging me. Java streams are seperated into those that read/write bytes, and those that read/write characters (I think).

Why would one want to use say a DataOutputStream instead of a FileWriter? Can someone help me understand when I would want to use which in what situations (and could you include an example that has to do with sockets?).

Classes that write bytes are faster. There is less overhead. When I had to write a program to parse fixed-length call data records (typically 8-15GB per file), I wrote it originally as BufferedReader and BufferedWriter. When I rewrote it to use FileInputStream the performance tripled.

It just depends on the purpose of the reader as to which you use. The character readers are easier to work with if they meet your needs.