Character Stream
A character stream is a sequence of characters (e.g., letters, digits, symbols) that is read from or written to a source, such as a file, network connection, or memory buffer, in a programming context. It provides an abstraction for handling text data by processing characters one at a time or in chunks, often using encoding schemes like UTF-8 or ASCII to represent characters as bytes. This concept is fundamental in input/output (I/O) operations for text-based data in many programming languages and systems.
Developers should learn about character streams when working with text files, user input, network communications, or any scenario involving textual data processing, as they offer efficient and standardized ways to read and write characters without dealing with low-level byte manipulation. For example, use character streams in Java with classes like FileReader or BufferedReader to handle file I/O, or in Python with the 'io' module for reading text from files or sockets, ensuring proper encoding handling and error management.