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Title is pretty self-explanatory. In a lot of the JRE javadocs I see the phrases "stream of bytes" and "stream of characters" all over the place.
But aren't they the same thing? Or are they slightly different (e.g. interpreted differently) in Java-land? Thanks in advance.
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Byte Streams − These handle data in bytes (8 bits) i.e., the byte stream classes read/write data of 8 bits. Using these you can store characters, videos, audios, images etc. Character Streams − These handle data in 16 bit Unicode. Using these you can read and write text data only.
Modern versions of Java define two types of streams: byte and character. (The original version of Java defined only the byte stream, but character streams were quickly added.) Byte streams provide a convenient means for handling input and output of bytes. They are used, for example, when reading or writing binary data.
In Java, characters are stored using Unicode conventions. Character stream automatically allows us to read/write data character by character. For example, FileReader and FileWriter are character streams used to read from the source and write to the destination.
In Java, a byte is not the same thing as a char. Therefore a byte stream is different from a character stream. Bytes are intended for arbitrary binary data; characters are specifically for data representing the building blocks of strings.
but if a char is only 1 byte in width
Except that it's not.
As per the JLS §4.2.1 a char is a number in the range:
from
'\u0000'to'\uffff'inclusive, that is, from 0 to 65535
But a byte is a number in the range
from -128 to 127, inclusive
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