Streams, Streams, TStream in Delphi

Streams, Streams, TStream in Delphi What Is a Stream? TStream? A stream is what its name suggests: a flowing river of data. A stream has a beginning, an end, and youre always somewhere in between of these two points. Using Delphis TStream objects you can read from or write to various kinds of storage media, such as disk files, dynamic memory, and so on. What Data Can a Stream Contain? A stream can contain anything you like, in the order you like. In the example project accompanying this article, fixed-size records are used for simplicity purposes, but you can write any mix of variable-sized data to a stream. Remember however, that _you_ are responsible for the householding. There is no way Delphi can remember what kind of data are in a stream, or in what order! Streams Versus Arrays Arrays have the disadvantage of having a fixed size that must be known at compile time. Ok, you can use dynamic arrays. A stream on the other hand, can grow up to the size of available memory, which is considerably large size on todays systems, without any householding chores. A stream cannot be indexed, as an array can. But as youll see below, walking up and down a stream is very easy. Streams can be saved/loaded to/from files in one simple operation. Flavors of Streams TStream is the base (abstract) class type for stream objects. Being abstract means that TStream should never be used as such, but only in its descendant forms. For streaming any kinds of information, choose a descendant class according to the specific data and storage needs. For example:   TFileStream (for working with files)TMemoryStream (for working with a memory buffer)TStringStream (for manipulating in-memory strings)TBlobStream (for working with BLOB fields)TWinSocketStream (for reading and writing over a socket connection)TOleStream (for using a COM interface to read and write) As youll see, TmemoryStream and TFileStream are remarkably interchangeable and compatible. Download  sample project!