I have written a fair amount of code to exchange ascii data with something that, all too recently, I discovered has a binary capability that is potentially very useful to me. My question is how to get out of this mess :) I create write streams on strings and write characters and strings to them and send the contents to the system. How different are strings and byte arrays? I recall seeing stringOrByteArray in a few places (some of that code is my own, written in Dolphin and carefully structured to note the underlying string, etc.). Is there anything I should keep in mind to make the transition less painful? Can I keep the strings and simply add binary with #asString, or change it all to byte arrays and get away with a similar trick? Can a binary or text stream change "personality" on the fly? I suspect that there are many hard ways out of this and probably only one or two smart ways. Bill