Why is text file showing data in String format even if wrote a byte array to file in Java?

Question

I am running below code to write byte array to text file but when I open my text file data is shown in String format

  File file = new File ("my.xml");        
  String xml =   MyClass.getContentsOfFile(file);
  FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("data.txt");

  byte [] mybytearray = xml.getBytes();

  fos.write(mybytearray);fos.close();

Answer 1

This is because everything is bytes. Even strings. The difference is that the sequence of bytes used to represent a string differ according to the encoding you chose.

Which is why it is important, when you read or write text, to specify which encoding you want to use.

Note that in your case you don't select an encoding at all, which means the JVM default is used. And this is not portable since different JVMs use different encodings.