file containing text and binary data

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hi I want to create a file which contains both text data and binary data. Which is the best possible way to create this. CStdioFile provided by MFC allows to achieve the same. But in C# which is the equivalent class for this or some other class which provides the same functionality.

the data should be like this

File output:

//text data- human readable
PersonName : Rama
Age : 22

//binary data
  @I@-@    Qi*@    >÷À    ØŽ!@   @S›%À   àíÔÀ   ÀÕ†@   à÷ß*À   à0’*@   à@   @wB@   €Ð-@    ¡ÙÀ    -øâ?   à¿	À    \ÑÀ   €ÔÞ@   ÀÉ"À    l@   @÷¤@   €¼RÀ    ¤@    ÆÈÀ    Ý¤@   €}?

[edit]Spurious code block removed - OriginalGriff[/edit]

Posted 1-Aug-11 22:22pm

Raghaav

Updated 1-Aug-11 22:27pm

OriginalGriff

v2

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Praveen Kullu 2-Aug-11 5:28am

Even the MSWord document (.doc & .docx) contains text and binary data.

2 solutions

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2011-08-02T23:37:00

I advise you to use the classes System.IO.BinaryWriter and System.IO.BinaryReader (and not stream classes). They can read and write both binary and text data. Note that all data is essentially binary. Text data just a sort of binary.

То write or read data, use overloaded methods Write or Read for each data type, including string.

Now, about the text. Pay attention that the writer and reader constructors allow to specify encoding. This is important, because the text can be written in different encoding. Make sure encodings match when you write and read the same data.

See:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.binarywriter.aspx[^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.binaryreader.aspx[^].

This is how your code sample should look:

C#

using (
    System.IO.BinaryWriter writer = new System.IO.BinaryWriter(
        System.IO.File.Open(
            "my_binary_sample.rda",
            System.IO.FileMode.CreateNew),
               System.Text.Encoding.UTF8))
{
                  double[] binary = new double[] { 123, 456, 8, 9, 0, 7, 6, 5, 5, 4, 3, 3 };
                  writer.Write("Line 1");
                  writer.Write("Line 2");
                  writer.Write("Line 3");
                  foreach (double val in binary)
                     writer.Write(val);
}

Check out "using". It is important as it guarantees closing of streams even if exception occurs.

—SA

Manfred Rudolf Bihy · Answer 2 · 2011-08-01T22:28:00

Solution 1

How hard can that be? I googled "C# write binary file" and these two below are the very first:

Now if you are wondering how I came to think of these unlikely search terms, I must confess I don't have a clue. ;)

Cheers!

—MRB

Posted 1-Aug-11 22:28pm

Manfred Rudolf Bihy

Comments

Raghaav 2-Aug-11 5:20am

the output doesn't give the string hello, instead it has some special characters. which i don;t want

Manfred Rudolf Bihy 2-Aug-11 5:33am

That is because Strings in .NET are unicode. So when you write to a binary file without converting the text to ascii first you'll see strange characters appear inbetween. Have a look at System.Text.Encoding.ASCII and the associated sample found here.

Cheers!

Raghaav 2-Aug-11 5:38am

StreamWriter writer

= File.CreateText("C:\\temp.txt");

double[] binary = new double[] { 123, 456, 8, 9, 0, 7, 6, 5, 5, 4, 3, 3 };

writer.WriteLine("Line 1");

writer.WriteLine("Line 2");

writer.WriteLine("Line 3");

writer.Flush();

BinaryWriter writer1 = new BinaryWriter(writer.BaseStream);

writer1.Seek((int)writer.BaseStream.Length, SeekOrigin.Begin);

foreach(double val in binary)

{

writer1.Write(val);

}

writer.Close();

writer1.Close();

This is one of the code which we came up, which suffices the need.

But i want to have one stream which handles like binarywriter