Classes reader and writer and their subclasses

As we mentioned several times already, Reader and Writer classes are very similar in their function to InputStream and OutputStream classes but specialize in processing texts. They interpret stream bytes as characters and have their own independent InputStream and OutputStream class hierarchy. It is possible to process stream bytes as characters without Reader and Writer or any of their subclasses. We have seen such examples in the preceding sections describing InputStream and OutputStream classes. However, using Reader and Writer classes makes text processing simpler and the code easier to read.