Text to binary (.txt to .bin)

Question

Hello,
I'm developing an application on J2ME that needs to read from files.
I want to use binary files instead text files, because I think that in this way I have two benefits:
1. reducing the jar size
2. speeding up the reading process.
that's the starting point...and I hope this approach is right.
I've developed a small class in J2SE just as an utility to convert .txt files in .bin files and...GULP!!!...a txt file of 22KB becomes 44KB converted in .bin...there is something wrong, but I don't know.
here is the code I wrote:
package texttobin;
import java.io.*;
public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        File inFile  = null;    //the file to read
        File outFile = null;    //the file to write
        //read the path from commandline
        if (args.length > 0)
            inFile = new File(args[0]);
            outFile = new File(args[1]);
        //some checkings
        if (inFile == null) return;
        if (outFile == null) return;
        try {
            //setup the streams
            FileOutputStream outputStream = new FileOutputStream (outFile);
            DataOutputStream dataOutputStream = new DataOutputStream (outputStream);
            FileInputStream sourceStream = new FileInputStream(inFile);
            byte readingByte[] = new byte[1];
            while(true) {
                if (sourceStream.read(readingByte)!=-1) {
                    //to be sure: I convert the readed input byte in a string
                    //and pass the char inside to the writeChar method...
                    dataOutputStream.writeChar(new String(readingByte).charAt(0));
                    //the same result is achieved with:
                    //dataOutputStream.writeChars(new String(readingByte));
                else break;
            dataOutputStream.close();
            outputStream.close();
            sourceStream.close();
        catch(FileNotFoundException fnfe)
            System.out.println (fnfe);
            return;
        catch(IOException ioe)
            System.out.println (ioe);
            return;
}WHAT'S WRONG?!
THANKS A LOT!!!
daniele

Answer 1

ZIP it or use a 7-bit encoding scheme (which isn't
easy). As for faster reading: you need to see that
the decoding of your file format doesn't take more
time than the reading of an unencoded format would
take.Yes, you're right, but I thought that the bottleneck is the reading process, not the decoding algorhytm (hopefully!!!)
I found an article that say:
An ASCII file is a binary file that stores ASCII codes. Recall that an ASCII code is a 7-bit code stored in a byte. To be more specific, there are 128 different ASCII codes, which means that only 7 bits are needed to represent an ASCII character.
However, since the minimum workable size is 1 byte, those 7 bits are the low 7 bits of any byte. The most significant bit is 0. That means, in any ASCII file, you're wasting 1/8 of the bits. In particular, the most significant bit of each byte is not being used.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc311/Notes/BitOp/asciiBin.html
(and sorry for the mistake: 7-bit not 7 bytes!!!)
another intrested thing I've found is here:
http://www2.sys-con.com/ITSG/virtualcd/Java/archives/0607/heaton/index.html
there is some ways to store strings in bin files (like fstream in C++), but I didn't tested yet if in this way I can reduce the size of the bin.
The files are stored in the jar file, then zipping maybe can reduce more the size of the jar, but I think that when the stream opens it takes the real bytes of the contained text (well...I'm not sure...may you confirm it?)
thank you.