Reader class abstract

Abstract class for reading character streams.

The only methods that a subclass must implement are readChar and close. Most subclasses, however, will override some of the methods defined here in order to provide higher efficiency, additional functionality, or both.

Design Philosophy

The Reader class provides a uniform interface for reading character data from various sources. Unlike InputStream which deals with raw bytes, Reader handles character encoding and provides text-oriented operations.

Example Usage

// Reading from a file
final reader = FileReader('document.txt');
try {
  String line;
  while ((line = await reader.readLine()) != null) {
    print('Line: $line');
  }
} finally {
  await reader.close();
}

// Reading with buffering for better performance
final bufferedReader = BufferedReader(FileReader('large_document.txt'));
try {
  final content = await bufferedReader.readAll();
  processText(content);
} finally {
  await bufferedReader.close();
}