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.

A newLine() method is provided, which uses the platform's own notion of line separator as defined by the system property line.separator. Not all platforms use the newline character ('\n') to terminate lines. 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. For example,

 PrintWriter out
   = new PrintWriter(new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("foo.out")));
 

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.