Writing Bytes to a text file

Question

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);

Vulpes · 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; } } } } }

Vulpes · Answer

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(); } }

Vulpes · Answer

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

kiran murthy · Answer

Thank you very much! For clearing that for me! :)

kiran murthy · Answer

yaa i got that but how do i read using streamreader later on?? and get the text back?

kiran murthy · Answer

i am sorry for being really dense but could you please tell me how to read back from the file later on??

kiran murthy · Answer

Isnt there anyway to hide the textual information??

Vulpes · Answer

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.