18. Text and Binary files, Character and Binary streams

• Two types of files:

  • Text: contain readable characters stored as bytes and CR-LF line delimeters^(*)

  • Binary: contain blocks of bytes used by proprietary program protocols

• Two types of streams

  • Character

  • Binary

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  ^(*) The actual line delimeters are OS-specific:

  • CR-LF on Windows

  • LF on Mac OS X, UNIX, and Linux

  • CR on Mac OS up to version 9 and OS-9

  • For details, see wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline

  • In Java, you can obtain your local newLine delimiter as follows:

            static final String newLine = System.getProperty( "line.separator" );