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

What you're seeing is actually a 7 bit encoded integer, which is a kind of integer compression.
The BinaryWriter prepend the text with this so readers (i.e. BinaryReader) will know how long the written string is.

• BinaryWriter.Write7BitEncodedInt
• BinaryReader.Read7BitEncodedInt

You can read more about the implementation details of this at http://dpatrickcaldwell.blogspot.se/2011/09/7-bit-encoding-with-binarywriter-in-net.html.