I/O Enhancements

The I/O package has been extended with character streams, which are like byte streams except that they contain 16-bit Unicode characters rather than eight-bit bytes. Character streams make it easy to write programs that are not dependent upon a specific character encoding, and are therefore easy to internationalize. Nearly all of the functionality available for byte streams is also available for character streams.

NOTE: Many of the enhancements to I/O were developed specifically to support internationalization, but they should be of interest to all developers.

• Character streams
• Changes to java.io after JDK 1.1 beta2

• java.io Package