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Stream I/O

The Stream I/O package has been enhanced in JDK 1.1 in order to improve the handling of character data. Two major changes have taken place. First, the notion of character streams has been introduced through the Reader and Writer class hierarchy. This hierarchy parallels the InputStream/OutputStream hierarchy but operates on streams of characters rather than streams of bytes. Among the features of the Reader and Writer classes is the ability to convert between Unicode and other character encodings.

The second change to the I/O package is that PrintStream has been enhanced to produce output using the system's default character encoding and default line terminator.This change allows the common System.out.println idiom to act more reasonably with non-ASCII data.

The I/O package changes are described fully in the "I/O Enhancements" document in the "JDK Guide to New Features" that is provided with the JDK 1.1 Beta documentation. Please refer to that document for more information.

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