The correct way to write text data to a file is to use a Writer, not an
OutputStream.

But if you really want to mangle your text data pretty hard, read the
documentation of the String class.

/Thomas

stringvar.getBytes()

Casting cannot be used to change an object from one type to another.

However if you had spent a few moments browsing the API docs for
String, you would have found methods that do what you need.

Note too that any kind of Writer (such as an OutputStreamWriter or a
FileWriter) let you write Strings directly, i.e. they do the
conversion on the fly, so you don't have to.

/gordon

Which bytes ?

Any given String has many different representations as binary data depending on
which character encoding you want to use.  You /cannot/ convert a String to a
byte[] array without choosing an encoding.  There are some APIs which /appear/
to allow you to do so (as you would have seen if you'd looked at the
documentation) but in fact they just choose the "system default" encoding for
you -- which is quite likely to be wrong for your purposes.

   -- chris

not casting, but converting. See
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/conversion.html#BYTETOSTRING

A PrintWriter will do that conversion fro you automatically.  See
http://mindprod.com/applets/fileio.html

And tell it you want to write encoded characters.  It will generate
you a sample program.