Question

All I want to do is read characters from a notepad and convert it to bytes and save it another file.

“a.txt” has the simple text in notepad “Hello World!”

However, in “b.txt”, I still see the human readable characters instead of the byte values. I also noticed that when I do a System.out.print(ba), it prints the bytes.

Can anyone tell me why Java does not write the byte values to “b.txt”?

import java.io.*;

class a {
    static int f;
    static String s;

    public static void main(String args[]) 
    throws IOException {
        BufferedReader  br = new BufferedReader(new FileReader ("a.txt"));
        BufferedOutputStream w = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream("b.txt"));

        byte ba[] = new byte[1024];

        while((s=br.readLine())!=null) {
            ba = s.getBytes();
            System.out.print(ba);
            w.write(ba);
        }
    w.flush();
    w.close();
    br.close();
    }
}

Answer 1

You’re writing raw byte values to the file.
Notepad reads them as ASCII text.

If you open either file in a hex editor, you will see the actual byte values.

If you want to see byte values in Notepad, you’ll need to print each byte to the file as a string, typically separated by spaces so that you can see each one.