Question

First,we have PrintWriter

java.io.File f=new java.io.File("s.txt");

   java.io.PrintWriter out=new java.io.PrintWriter(f);

   out.print(5);

   out.print(7);

   out.close();

Then we have outputstream

 java.io.File f=new java.io.File("s.txt");

 java.io.FileOutputStream out=new java.io.FileOutputStream(f);

   out.write(5);

   out.write(7);

   out.close();

Whats the difference?

Answer 1

OutputStreams are meant for binary data. Writers (including PrintWriter) are meant for text data.

You may not see the difference in your specific situation as you’re calling PrintWriter.write(int) which writes a single character – if the character encoding you’re using just maps characters to the same byte, for characters less than 127, then you’ll see the same result. But if you give it a different encoding, then you’ll see a difference.

PrintWriter is also different in that it suppresses IO exceptions – as does PrintStream, which is the binary stream equivalent of PrintWriter.