How to read file binary in C#?

Question

I want to make a method that takes any file and reads it as an array of 0s and 1s, i.e. its binary code. I want to save that binary code as a text file. Can you help me? Tha

Answer 1

Well, reading it isn't hard, just use FileStream to read a byte[]. Converting it to text isn't really generally possible or meaningful unless you convert the 1's and 0's to hex. That's easy to do with the BitConverter.ToString(byte[]) overload. You'd generally want to dump 16 or 32 bytes in each line. You could use Encoding.ASCII.GetString() to try to convert the bytes to characters. A sample program that does this:

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

class Program {
    static void Main(string[] args) {
        // Read the file into 
        var fs = new FileStream(@"c:\temp\test.bin", FileMode.Open);
        var len = (int)fs.Length;
        var bits = new byte[len];
        fs.Read(bits, 0, len);
        // Dump 16 bytes per line
        for (int ix = 0; ix < len; ix += 16) {
            var cnt = Math.Min(16, len - ix);
            var line = new byte[cnt];
            Array.Copy(bits, ix, line, 0, cnt);
            // Write address + hex + ascii
            Console.Write("{0:X6}  ", ix);
            Console.Write(BitConverter.ToString(line));
            Console.Write("  ");
            // Convert non-ascii characters to .
            for (int jx = 0; jx < cnt; ++jx)
                if (line[jx] < 0x20 || line[jx] > 0x7f) line[jx] = (byte)'.';
            Console.WriteLine(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(line));
        }
        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}