StringBufferINputStream deprecated for StringReader

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Could someone please explain this to me? It’s been bothering me for about 10 years now.

The only class that lets you get an InputStream out of a String has been deprecate in favour of a class that only gives you a Reader.

Yes, it’s a reader out of a string, but … its not an IS.

And practically every library on the planet [ * ] uses IS’s … IIRC partly because Sun encouraged everyone to. All data is expected to be provided as streams.

I wanted to clean up some code thats throwing out compiler warnings, and this turned out to be the main culprit. But … some quick googling reveals World + Dog all using it despite deprecation, and all complaining that Sun hasn’t yet provided an alternative.

I keep hoping there’s some missing class (e.g. since 1.5) I’ve not yet noticed that fixes the problem. Suggestions?

[ * ] = that I come into contact with - most obvious / common ones are XML libs, but obviously I do an awful lot with networking so no surprise there. But every large data-handling lib I’ve seen uses streams because, well, that’s the ONLY sensible way to do it, isn’t it? Lets you have arbitrarily large datasets with constant mem usage?

#2

Would something like (just typed, not compiled) do for UTF8:


public class ReaderInputStream extends InputStream {
    private Reader target;

    public ReaderInputStream(Reader reader) {
          this.target = reader;
    }

    public int read() throws IOException {
          return target.read();
    }
}

Kev

#3

Is it that big a deal?

new ByteArrayInputStream(x.getBytes())

works for me. Of course supply a charset/encoding to the getBytes() call if needed.