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A stream is a sequence of bytes or characters.
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All types of streams are treated similarly, but may have different stream sources and sinks:
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files
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network connections
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blocks of memory
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threads
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The most basic byte streams are InputStream and OutputStream. These classes have methods that can read or write a byte from or to a stream:
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int read();
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void write( int );
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skip( long ); available(); flush(); close();
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All of the above methods throw a possible IOException.
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The read() and write( int ) methods "block" during transfer.
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