The Java input/output (I/O) facilities provide a simple, standardized API for reading and writing character and byte data from various data sources. This article explores the I/O classes ...

In .NET, the byte streams include the Stream, FileStream, MemoryStream, and BufferedStream classes. The .NET character streams include TextReader, TextWriter, StreamReader, and StreamWriter.

You use the additional character = to pad the byte stream’s last one or two byte portions. RFC 2045 describes the algorithm in more detail.