What is the Difference between PrintWriter and DataOutputStream?
I'm working on a chat room application for android. I read different tutorials; some of them use PrintWriter to send data and some of them use DataOutputStream. What is the difference between these two? Which one is better for a chat app?
Answer
From java docs
A DataOutputStream lets an application write primitive Java data types to an output stream in a portable way. An application can then use a data input stream to read the data back in.
PrintWriter Prints formatted representations of objects to a text-output stream. This class implements all of the print methods found in PrintStream. It does not contain methods for writing raw bytes, for which a program should use unencoded byte streams.
In one sentence the difference is:
OutputStreams are meant for binary data. Writers (including PrintWriter) are meant for text data