The read stream interface

RReadStream is an abstract class that presents the necessary interface for internalising from a stream. When called, the InternalizeL() member function of a class is passed a reference to a concrete read stream object; for example, an object constructed from a class such as RStoreReadStream . This allows InternalizeL() to read the object's data from any stream, regardless of that stream’s concrete implementation.

All data types, including non-class types, can be internalised, although some can only be internalised using the templated stream operator>> .

RReadStream provides support for internalising:

• TInt , TUint , TReal and TReal64 types.

• The content of a descriptor.

It also provides support for externalising data to a write stream.

The ReadInt8L() , ReadUint8L() , ReadInt16L() and ReadUint16L() member functions allow applications to extract data from the stream written as 8 bit and 16 bit values.

The read stream interface also allows data to be internalised to a location defined by a pointer and a length. However, this functionality is rarely used by application code.