What is the benefit of using a TextReader/Writer instead of a Binary Reader/Writer for string data?

Question

Is it correct to assume the only difference here is that Binary Reader/Writer use a fixed-length encoding for strings, and therefore may be less efficient?

Answer 1

No there are a bucket load of other differences, e.g. read and writeline, encoding... Basically loads of 'helper' functions that pertain to text.

Answer 2

The difference is that regular text files aren't full of length prefixes. If you are writing a file that is intended to be read as text: use a TextWriter.

You might think that "ah, and BinaryWriter is for binary", but that isn't really true: BinaryWriter and BinaryReader are paired to eachother, but there is no "general" specification for writing text data in a binary file. It would entirely depend on the file format / protocol, and in most binary cases BinaryWriter is no use whatsoever. More commonly you just use Stream when dealing with binary data.