Character Streams

Reader and Writer are the abstract superclasses for character streams in java.io.
Reader provides the API and partial implementation for readers--streams that read 16-bit characters--and Writer provides the API and partial implementation for writers--streams that write 16-bit characters.
Subclasses of Reader and Writer implement specialized streams and are divided into two categories:
those that read from or write to data sinks (shown in gray in the following figures)
those that perform some sort of processing (shown in white).

Reader and Writer are the abstract superclasses for character streams in java.io.