在Java中将字符存储为单个字节

Question

I read that we should use Reader/Writer for reading/writing character data and InputStream/OutputStream for reading/writing binary data. Also, in java characters are 2 bytes. I am wondering how the following program works. It reads characters from standard input stores them in a single byte and prints them out. How are two byte characters fitting into one byte here?

http://www.cafeaulait.org/course/week10/06.html

Answer 1

The comment explains it pretty clearly:

// Notice that although a byte is read, an int
// with value between 0 and 255 is returned.
// Then this is converted to an ISO Latin-1 char 
// in the same range before being printed.

So basically, this assumes that the incoming byte represents a character in ISO-8859-1.

If you use a console with a different encoding, or perhaps provide a character which isn't in ISO-8859-1, you'll end up with problems.

Basically, this is not good code.

Answer 2

Java stores characters as 2 bytes, but for normal ASCII characters the actual data fits in one byte. So as long as you can assume the file being read there is ASCII then that will work fine, as the actual numeric value of the character fits in a single byte.