Difference in character oriented and byte oriented streams

Difference between character oriented and byte oriented streams

Byte stream access the file byte by byte. A byte stream is suitable for any kind of file, however not quite appropriate for text files. For example, if the file is using a Unicode encoding and a character is represented with two bytes, the byte stream will treat these separately and you will need to do the conversion yourself. A character stream will read a file character by character. A character stream needs to be given the file's encoding in order to work properly.