Synopsis

Class Name:

java.io.FileReader

Superclass:

java.io.InputStreamReader

Immediate Subclasses:

None

Interfaces Implemented:

None

Availability:

New as of JDK 1.1

Description

The FileReader class represents a character stream that reads data from a file. It is a subclass of InputStreamReader that uses a default buffer size (8192 bytes) to read bytes from a file and the default character encoding scheme to convert the bytes to characters. If you need to specify the character encoding or the buffer size, wrap an InputStreamReader around a FileInputStream.

The file can be specified using a FileDescriptor, a File object, or a String that represents a pathname. All of the constructors can throw a SecurityException if the application does not have permission to read from the specified file.

FileReader provides a low-level interface for reading character data from a file. You should think about wrapping a FileReader with a BufferedReader to increase reading efficiency.

If you need to read binary data from a file, you should use a FileInputStream wrapped by a DataInputStream instead.

Class Summary

public class java.io.FileReader extends java.io.InputStreamReader {
  // Constructors
  public FileReader(String fileName);
  public FileReader(File file);
  public FileReader(FileDescriptor fd);
}

Constructors

Inherited Methods

See Also

BufferedReader, DataInputStream, File, FileDescriptor, FileInputStream, FileNotFoundException, InputStreamReader, IOException, NullPointerException, Reader, SecurityException