Defines an interface for classes that are able to read big-endian typed data from some source. Typically, this data has been written by a class which implements Java.IO.IDataOutput. Types that can be read include byte, 16-bit short, 32-bit int, 32-bit float, 64-bit long, 64-bit double, byte strings, and MUTF-8 strings.

MUTF-8 (Modified UTF-8) Encoding

When encoding strings as UTF, implementations of DataInput and DataOutput use a slightly modified form of UTF-8, hereafter referred to as MUTF-8. This form is identical to standard UTF-8, except:

• Only the one-, two-, and three-byte encodings are used.
• Code points in the range U+10000 … U+10ffff are encoded as a surrogate pair, each of which is represented as a three-byte encoded value.
• The code point U+0000 is encoded in two-byte form.

Please refer to for further information about character encoding. MUTF-8 is actually closer to the (relatively less well-known) encoding than to UTF-8 per se.

See Also

• Java.IO.DataInputStream
• Java.IO.RandomAccessFile

[Android Documentation]