FileReader & FileWriter

In the previous chapter, raw bytes were read and written with FileInputStream and FileOutputStream. That works fine for binary files (images, PDFs, ZIPs), but it falls apart for human-readable text in any language other than plain English. This chapter is about FileReader and FileWriter, the character-stream counterparts in java.io. They sit on top of the byte streams and handle one extra job: converting between bytes on disk and char values in memory using a character set.