Why does BinaryWriter prepend gibberish to the start of a stream? How do you avoid it?

Question

I\'m debugging some issues with writing pieces of an object to a file and I\'ve gotten down to the base case of just opening the file and writing \"TEST\" in it. I\'m doing

Answer 1

That's because a BinaryWriter is writing the binary representation of the string, including the length of the string. If you were to write straight data (e.g. byte[], etc.) it won't include that length.

byte[] text = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes("test");
FileStream fs = new FileStream("C:\\test.txt", FileMode.Create);
BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(fs);
writer.Write(text);
writer.Close();

You'll notice that it doesn't include the length. If you're going to be writing textual data using the binary writer, you'll need to convert it first.