Writing Bytes to a text file

kiran murthy

Guys i am trying to use the following lines of code, but when i check out the file that is being saved, all i see is the exact same text. but not the converted bytes, What am i doing wrong?

String text = "Line 1" + Environment.NewLine;
text += "Line 2" + Environment.NewLine;
text += "Line 3" + Environment.NewLine;
text += "Line 4" + Environment.NewLine;
Byte[] b = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(text);
File.WriteAllBytes(path, b);

8 Replies

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Vulpes14y ago
Accepted answer
Well, you could write the hex equivalent of the bytes to the text file rather than the bytes themselves. To give a tidy display, you could do this in lines of 16 bytes separated by spaces, similar to a hex editor.

For example, try running this program and then opening the resulting text file with notepad:

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

class Test
{
static void Main()
{
string text = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
byte[] ba = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(text);
using(StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter("kiran.txt"))
{
int count = 0;

foreach(byte b in ba)
{
sw.Write(String.Format("{0} ", b.ToString("x2")));
count++;
if (count == 16)
{
sw.WriteLine();
count = 0;
}
}
}
}
}
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kiran murthy14y ago
Thank you very much! For clearing that for me! :)
0
Vulpes14y ago
You can recover the text as follows:

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;

class Test
{
static void Main()
{
string[] lines = File.ReadAllLines("kiran.txt");
List list = new List();

foreach(string line in lines)
{
string[] items = line.TrimEnd().Split(' ');
foreach(string item in items)
{
byte b = Convert.ToByte(item, 16);
list.Add(b);
}
}

string text = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(list.ToArray());
Console.WriteLine(text);
Console.ReadKey();
}
}
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kiran murthy14y ago
yaa i got that but how do i read using streamreader later on?? and get the text back?
0
Vulpes14y ago
Just open notepad (or another text editor), navigate to where kiran.txt has been created and open it.

You should see output like this:

54 68 65 20 71 75 69 63 6b 20 62 72 6f 77 6e 20
66 6f 78 20 6a 75 6d 70 73 20 6f 76 65 72 20 74
68 65 20 6c 61 7a 79 20 64 6f 67
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kiran murthy14y ago
i am sorry for being really dense, but could you please tell me how to read back from the file later on??
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kiran murthy14y ago
Isnt there anyway to hide the textual information??
0
Vulpes14y ago
If you're viewing the bytes in a text editor such as Notepad then they will be shown in textual form, if they have one.

If you want to view them as bytes (so 'A' will be 0x41 etc), then you need to use a hex editor instead.
0