common-io-tasks-in-modern-java.md

Common I/O Tasks in Modern Java

• Reading and writing text files
• Reading text, images, JSON from the web
• Visiting files in a directory
• Reading a ZIP file
• Creating a temporary file or directory

Focus on API improvements since Java 8. In particular:

• UTF-8 is the default for I/O since Java 18 (since JEP 400: UTF-8 by Default)
• java.nio.file.Files class, which first appeared in Java 7, added useful methods in Java 8, 11, and 12
• java.io.InputStream gained useful methods in Java 9, 11, and 12
• java.io.File and java.io.BufferedReader classes are now thoroughly obsolete, even though they appear frequently in web searches and AI chats.

Reading from an Input Stream

If you need to set request headers or read response headers, use the HttpClient: