Java BufferedWriter Class Tutorial and Example

The BufferedWriter class of java.io package, writes text to a character-output stream, buffering characters so as to provide for the efficient writing of single characters, arrays, and strings.

The buffer size may be specified, or the default size may be accepted. The default is large enough for most purposes. Always take into consideration of this rule to avoid complications in using the BufferedWriter class.

A newLine() method is provided, which uses the platform’s own notion of line separator as defined by the system property line.separator. Take into consideration that not all platforms use the newline character (‘n’) to terminate lines. Because of such case, calling this method to terminate each output line is therefore preferred to writing a newline character directly.

In general, a Writer sends its output immediately to the underlying character or byte stream. Unless prompt output is required, it is advisable to wrap a BufferedWriter around any Writer whose write() operations may be costly, such as FileWriters and OutputStreamWriters.

If you are looking for class to be used to write to a file, as a general practice BufferedWriter is being used actively because the method available are user friendly.

public class BufferedWriter

extends Writer

StringTokenizer Class is available since Java 1.1

The BufferedWriter class as part of the java.io package is one of the classes of the java api that is widely used because it provides mechanism in writing to a file. It is widely used as a wrapper to other Writer classes whose write() operations may be costly, such as FileWriters and OutputStreamWriters. Lets take in below example:

BufferedWriter bw = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("/tmp/test.txt"));

The above example will buffer the PrintWriter’s output to the file. Without buffering, each invocation of a print() method would cause characters to be converted into bytes that would then be written immediately to the file, which can be very inefficient.

The following are the detailed list of BufferedWriter methods and descriptions. We have also provided links to examples of each method on the list.