textström

Textström, or text stream, is an abstract concept in computer input/output that refers to a sequence of characters intended for textual data. Unlike binary streams, which operate on bytes, a text stream applies a character encoding and typically supports reading and writing characters individually or in blocks. The term is used in several Scandinavian programming contexts to distinguish textual data from binary data.

Common features include buffering, character encoding management, line-ending translation, and error handling. A text stream may translate newline characters according to a platform convention (for example, LF versus CRLF) and convert between internal representations and external encodings such as UTF-8, UTF-16, or ISO-8859-1. Text streams often provide methods to read lines, read entire content, write strings, and flush buffered data.

In programming languages, text streams are typically provided as separate APIs from binary streams. For example, Java offers Reader and Writer classes for character streams; Python 3 distinguishes between text I/O and binary I/O through open with encoding and text mode; C# provides StreamReader and StreamWriter. Some languages allow automatic encoding detection or require explicit charset specification. The underlying implementation usually buffers data to improve performance and handles transcoding when reading from or writing to devices or networks.

Applications include processing text files, logs, configuration data, network protocols that operate on text, and streaming large text corpora. The concept emphasizes correctness and portability, particularly with respect to encoding, locale, and line endings. Potential pitfalls include encoding mismatches, improper newline handling, and differences in end-of-file semantics across platforms.