Programming

what the different between:

File a = new File("xanadu.txt");

in = new FileInputStream("xanadu.txt");

inputStream = new BufferedReader(new FileReader("xanadu.txt"));

Actually, the javadoc already tells you what the differences are. From java.io.FileInputStream:

Source: FileInputStream (Java Platform SE 6)

BufferedReader implements a line-buffered layer on top of FileReader to allow convenient extraction of lines, and usually buffered I/O is more efficient. But of course, this is only relevant to text files because binary files have no notion of "lines".

Also, the fact that FileInputStream is byte-oriented and FileReader is character-oriented will be obvious when it comes to reading multibyte files, that uses an encoding where a character consists of 2 or more bytes. FileReader will decode properly because that is character-oriented.