How would I parse a file (which seperates unicode text with 00 bytes) into a list?

Question

Given a selection of bytes in a hex editor shows the file separates text with 00 bytes, it's a coloring file, with the material name, follolwed by a 3 byte hex code that determines colour. which is why it contains bytes like FF. the bytes are shown like this:

00 11 46 6F 6C 69 61 67 65 5F 45 76 65 72 67 72 65 65 6E 00 FF FF FF 00 0D 46 6F 6C 69 61 67 65 5F 42 69 72 63 68 00 80 A7 55

which translates into ascii as such:

Foliage_Evergreen�ÿÿÿ�
Foliage_Birch�€§U

How would I separate these bytes down into a list and convert them into text list of the bytes' values? I'm having trouble understanding how I'd go about doing it... this is what I'm doing right now:

OpenFileDialog openFileDialog1 = new OpenFileDialog();

if (openFileDialog1.ShowDialog() == System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK)
{
}
string line = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(openFileDialog1.FileName);
byte[] bytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(line);
List<string> listtext = line.Split('.').ToList();
listBox1.DataSource = listtext;

Answer 1

You shouldn’t do that, will crash for some files with encoding exception:

string line = System.IO.File.ReadAllText(openFileDialog1.FileName);
byte[] bytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(line);

Use File.ReadAllBytes instead, no need to read text then convert to bytes.

Then you’ll need to parse array of bytes into your records.

Based on your example data, your format uses 0 as field separator, and strings are prepended by their lengths. Here’s an example how to parse, untested:

static IEnumerable<(string, Color)> parse( byte[] data )
{
    for( int p = 0; p < data.Length; )
    {
        // '\0'
        if( 0 != data[ p++ ] ) throw new ApplicationException();
        // String length byte
        int length = data[ p++ ];
        // The string; assuming the encoding is UTF8
        string name = Encoding.UTF8.GetString( data, p, length );
        p += length;
        // '\0'
        if( 0 != data[ p++ ] ) throw new ApplicationException();
        // 3 color bytes, assuming the order is RGB
        Color color = Color.FromArgb( 0xFF, data[ p ], data[ p + 1 ], data[ p + 2 ] );
        p += 3;
        yield return (name, color);
    }
}