What do we mean by Byte array

Question

Could someone please explain  I do not exactly get the concept   What is a Byte Array   Where and when we use it in applications programs   what are the advantages and disadvantages of using a byte array

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A byte is 8 bits  binary data    A byte array is an array of bytes  tautology FTW     You could use a byte array to store a collection of binary data  for example  the contents of a file  The downside to this is that the entire file contents must be loaded into memory   For large amounts of binary data  it would be better to use a streaming data type if your language supports it

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From wikipedia      In computer science  an array data   structure or simply array is a data   structure consisting of a collection   of elements  values or variables     each identified by one or more integer   indices  stored so that the address of   each element can be computed from its   index tuple by a simple mathematical   formula    So when you say byte array  you re referring to an array of some defined length  e g  number of elements  that contains a collection of byte  8 bits   sized elements   In C  a byte array could look like   byte   bytes     3  10  8  25      The sample above defines an array of 4 elements  where each element can be up to a Byte in length

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I assume you know what a byte is   A byte array is simply an area of memory containing a group of contiguous  side by side  bytes  such that it makes sense to talk about them in order  the first byte  the second byte etc    Just as bytes can encode different types and ranges of data  numbers from 0 to 255  numbers from -128 to 127  single characters using ASCII e g   a  or      CPU op-codes   each byte in a byte array may be any of these things  or contribute to some multi-byte values such as numbers with larger range  e g  16-bit unsigned int from 0  65535   international character sets  textual strings   hello    or part all of a compiled computer programs   The crucial thing about a byte array is that it gives indexed  fast   precise  raw access to each 8-bit value being stored in that part of memory  and you can operate on those bytes to control every single bit   The bad thing is the computer just treats every entry as an independent 8-bit number - which may be what your program is dealing with  or you may prefer some powerful data-type such as a string that keeps track of its own length and grows as necessary  or a floating point number that lets you store say 3 14 without thinking about the bit-wise representation   As a data type  it is inefficient to insert or remove data near the start of a long array  as all the subsequent elements need to be shuffled to make or fill the gap created required

[java] What do we mean by Byte array?

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