Output streams
The two primary kinds of output streams are separated by the way they write data; one writes it for human consumption, and the other writes it to be reacquired by a DataInputStream. The RandomAccessFile stands alone, although its data format is compatible with the DataInputStream and DataOutputStream.
5. Storing and recovering data
A PrintWriter formats data so that it’s readable by a human. However, to output data for recovery by another stream, you use a DataOutputStream to write the data and a DataInputStream to recover the data. Of course, these streams could be anything, but here a file is used, buffered for both reading and writing. DataOutputStream and DataInputStream are byte-oriented and thus require the InputStreams and OutputStreams.
If you use a DataOutputStream to write the data, then Java guarantees that you can accurately recover the data using a DataInputStream—regardless of what different platforms write and read the data. This is incredibly valuable, as anyone knows who has spent time worrying about platform-specific data issues. That problem vanishes if you have Java on both platforms.[63]
When using a DataOutputStream, the only reliable way to write a String so that it can be recovered by a DataInputStream is to use UTF-8 encoding, accomplished in section 5 of the example using writeUTF( ) and readUTF( ). UTF-8 is a variation on Unicode, which stores all characters in two bytes. If you’re working with ASCII or mostly ASCII characters (which occupy only seven bits), this is a tremendous waste of space and/or bandwidth, so UTF-8 encodes ASCII characters in a single byte, and non-ASCII characters in two or three bytes. In addition, the length of the string is stored in the first two bytes. However, writeUTF( ) and readUTF( ) use a special variation of UTF-8 for Java (which is completely described in the JDK documentation for those methods) , so if you read a string written with writeUTF( ) using a non-Java program, you must write special code in order to read the string properly.
With writeUTF( ) and readUTF( ), you can intermingle Strings and other types of data using a DataOutputStream with the knowledge that the Strings will be properly stored as Unicode, and will be easily recoverable with a DataInputStream.
The writeDouble( ) stores the double number to the stream and the complementary readDouble( ) recovers it (there are similar methods for reading and writing the other types). But for any of the reading methods to work correctly, you must know the exact placement of the data item in the stream, since it would be equally possible to read the stored double as a simple sequence of bytes, or as a char, etc. So you must either have a fixed format for the data in the file, or extra information must be stored in the file that you parse to determine where the data is located. Note that object serialization (described later in this chapter) may be an easier way to store and retrieve complex data structures.
6. Reading and writing random access files
As previously noted, the RandomAccessFile is almost totally isolated from the rest of the I/O hierarchy, save for the fact that it implements the DataInput and DataOutput interfaces. So you cannot combine it with any of the aspects of the InputStream and OutputStream subclasses. Even though it might make sense to treat a ByteArrayInputStream as a random-access element, you can use RandomAccessFile only to open a file. You must assume a RandomAccessFile is properly buffered since you cannot add that.
The one option you have is in the second constructor argument: you can open a RandomAccessFile to read (“r”) or read and write (“rw”).
Using a RandomAccessFile is like using a combined DataInputStream and DataOutputStream (because it implements the equivalent interfaces). In addition, you can see that seek( ) is used to move about in the file and change one of the values.
With the advent of new I/O in JDK 1.4, you may want to consider using memory-mapped files instead of RandomAccessFile.
