The InputStream Class

java.io.InputStream is an abstract class that contains the basic methods for reading raw bytes of data from a stream. Although InputStream is an abstract class, many methods in the class library are only specified to return an InputStream, s o you'll often have to deal directly with only the methods declared in this class.

 public abstract int read() throws IOException

 public int     read(byte[] data) throws IOException
 public int     read(byte[] data, int offset, int length)
  throws IOException

 public long    skip(long n) throws IOException
 public int     available() throws IOException
 public void    close() throws IOException
 
 public void    mark(int readLimit)
 public void    reset() throws IOException
 public boolean markSupported()

Notice that almost all these methods can throw an IOException. This is true of pretty much anything to do with input and output. The only exception is the PrintStream class which eats all exceptions.