What's the difference between writeUTF and writeChars?

Question

What's the difference between writeUTF and writeChars? (methods of ObjectOutputStream) Further I have not found the corresponding readChars in ObjectInputStream.

Answer 1

writeUTF writes text in UTF-8 format encoding preceeded with text length, so readUTF knows how many characters to read from stream.

writeChars writes text as a sequence of 2-bytes chars with no length. To read it, we should use readChar method and we need to know how many chars were written.