This is possible, but what is your reason for doing this? If you site your  
reason, the answer will probably become clear. If you are doing something  
like a MD-5 digest, you should recognize that digesters and other file  
functions expect to work on data files, without knowing whether or not the  
file is text.

On the other hand, if you need to write the content of a file to an  
external data stream, you will need to address the issue of whether or not  
the file's encoding will be different from the external stream's encoding.  
If you are uploading a local file to a server, the server might represent  
a character with a different byte than was used for the same character in  
the local file.

Only around 100 out of some 60,000 printable characters are representable  
as 1 byte in UTF-8. So, your reason should guide your search for a  
solution.

HTH,

-Zig

Instead of the convenience class FileReader, use the InputStreamReader  
specifying an appropriate charset and of course an actual stream  
representing the file.

You're not specific about what encoding you want to use, but given your  
claim that in the file each character is one byte, it's likely that  
"US-ASCII" (7-bit) or "ISO-8859-1" (8-bit) would be appropriate (actually,  
you could probably get away with specifying "UTF-8" for that matter,  
though I don't feel that'd strictly speaking be correct :) ).

Pete

On Sat, 5 Apr 2008 21:13:06 -0700 (PDT), "vijayanand85@gmail.com"
<vijayanand85@gmail.com> wrote, quoted or indirectly quoted someone
who said :

It is much more complicated than that.  see
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/encoding.html

For sample code, see http://mindprod.com/applet/fileio.html

Just use the InputStream class, about all it can do is read bytes.

InputStream in = new FileInputStream("myFile.txt");  //works for any
file
int b;  //need to use an in to get unsigned bytes because a byte in
java goes from -128 to +128
while((b = in.read()) != -1) //returns -1 at end of stream
{
   //do something with the byte
}