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? Thanks.

Answer 1

Quick and dirty version:

byte[] fileBytes = File.ReadAllBytes(inputFilename); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();  foreach(byte b in fileBytes) {     sb.Append(Convert.ToString(b, 2).PadLeft(8, '0'));   }  File.WriteAllText(outputFilename, sb.ToString()); 

Answer 2

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 <bits>         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();     } }