Apache Commons-IO overwhelms me with options

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I sure wish I understood what all this stuff does, because it looks like there are a lot of powerful options here: How do normal people discover the real world use cases of all this stuff?


































































































Class Summary
AutoCloseInputStream Proxy stream that closes and discards the underlying stream as soon as the
end of input has been reached or when the stream is explicitly closed.
BOMInputStream This class is used to wrap a stream that includes an encoded ByteOrderMark as its first bytes.
BoundedInputStream This is a stream that will only supply bytes up to a certain length – if its
position goes above that, it will stop.
BrokenInputStream Broken input stream.
CharSequenceInputStream InputStream implementation that can read from String, StringBuffer,
StringBuilder or CharBuffer.
CharSequenceReader Reader implementation that can read from String, StringBuffer,
StringBuilder or CharBuffer.
ClassLoaderObjectInputStream A special ObjectInputStream that loads a class based on a specified
ClassLoader rather than the system default.
ClosedInputStream Closed input stream.
CloseShieldInputStream Proxy stream that prevents the underlying input stream from being closed.
CountingInputStream A decorating input stream that counts the number of bytes that have passed
through the stream so far.
DemuxInputStream Data written to this stream is forwarded to a stream that has been associated
with this thread.
NullInputStream A functional, light weight InputStream that emulates
a stream of a specified size.
NullReader A functional, light weight Reader that emulates
a reader of a specified size.
ProxyInputStream A Proxy stream which acts as expected, that is it passes the method
calls on to the proxied stream and doesn’t change which methods are
being called.
ProxyReader A Proxy stream which acts as expected, that is it passes the method
calls on to the proxied stream and doesn’t change which methods are
being called.
ReaderInputStream InputStream implementation that reads a character stream from a Reader
and transforms it to a byte stream using a specified charset encoding.
ReversedLinesFileReader Reads lines in a file reversely (similar to a BufferedReader, but starting at
the last line).
SwappedDataInputStream DataInput for systems relying on little endian data formats.
TaggedInputStream An input stream decorator that tags potential exceptions so that the
stream that caused the exception can easily be identified.
Tailer Simple implementation of the unix “tail -f” functionality.
TailerListenerAdapter TailerListener Adapter.
TeeInputStream InputStream proxy that transparently writes a copy of all bytes read
from the proxied stream to a given OutputStream.
XmlStreamReader Character stream that handles all the necessary Voodo to figure out the
charset encoding of the XML document within the stream.

Post external references

  1. 1
    http://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-io/javadocs/api-release/index.html?org/apache/commons/io/input/package-summary.html
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