Bytes and Chars plus encoding

Hi,

I have a requirement to read bytes and at times characters from a given input stream. The characters in the input stream may be encoded in a particular encoding. I have a definition file, for the input stream I am supposed to read, which tells when and how much bytes/chars is to be read. Java allows to read eihter bytes or characters from a given stream. How can I read both from a given input stream?

For example, I want something like:

InputStream myInputStream;

int b = myInputStream.readByte();

// the character read below should be decoded using the appropriate

// encoding, which is known from the definition file.

int c = myInputStream.readChar();

Thanks,

Rahul.

[752 byte] By [Rahul_Srivastava] at [2007-9-30 13:58:24]