There have been many requests to add the duals of InputStreamReader and
OutputStreamWriter, namely ReaderInputStream and WriterOutputStream.  Because
encoding converters are hidden within the I/O classes at present, the only way
to get this functionality right now is to use a piped stream, which is not very
efficient.

N/A

Will not fix.  Now that we have a public API for character-set coding (see
java.nio.charset), there is no compelling reason to add these classes.

--   xxxxx@xxxxx   2002/5/23

Please fix this.  I need to write Gzipped and Zipped output
to a Writer and currently there is no way to do this.  See
also bug 4094886

Gee, what a surprise. Sun drops the ball by leaving out this much-needed bridge for going from Outputstream to Writer, and then flat-out refuses to correct their design mistake.  At a minimum, would it be so hard to add a new constructor to PrintStream that accepts a Writer as the destination?

Try a google search on 'ReaderInputStream'.
http://www.google.nl/search?q=ReaderInputstream

Gives many hits, not seldomly to apidocs of all kind of projects which simply added it themselves. A bit silly, all this, if you ask me.