Enthuware

Regarding DataInput and DataOutput implementations, why should I use writeChars over writeUTF? What's the difference between the two?

Thanks in advance.

The_Nick.

The difference is given in the API description itself:

writeChars: Writes every character in the string s, to the output stream, in order, two bytes per character.

writeUTF: Writes two bytes of length information to the output stream, followed by the modified UTF-8 representation of every character in the string s.

So if you want what you've written to be read on machines with a different default character encoding, you should write Strings using UTF.

HTH,
Paul.