C# Binary reading incomplete strings [closed]

Question

This question is unlikely to help any future visitors; it is only relevant to a small geographic area, a specific moment in time, or an extraordinarily narrow situation that is not generally applicable to the worldwide audience of the internet. For help making this question more broadly applicable, visit the help center.

Closed 8 years ago.

i was hoping to get some help on this problem, so as you can see in the picture bellow, i can't seem to read the whole word up to 0x00:

what i am trying ot do, is to just read the file strings properly ,here is the code i used to open the file:

        private void menuItem2_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        listView1.Items.Clear();
        textBox1.Text = "";
        menuItem12.Text = "file type is: ";
        OpenFileDialog ofd = new OpenFileDialog();
        ofd.Title = "Open File";
        ofd.Filter = "All Files (*.*)|*.*";
        if (ofd.ShowDialog() == System.Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK)
        {
            path = ofd.FileName;
            BinaryReader br = new BinaryReader(File.OpenRead(path), Encoding.GetEncoding("SHIFT-JIS"));
            foreach (char mychar in br.ReadChars(4)) menuItem12.Text += mychar;
            if (menuItem12.Text != "file type is: TXTD")
            {
                MessageBox.Show("This is not a TXTD file...", "Sorry", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Error);
                return;
            }
            else
            {
                    MessageBox.Show("File opened Succesfully!", "Info", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Information);
                    br.BaseStream.Position = 0x8;
                    int Pntrnum = br.ReadInt16();
                    menuItem11.Visible = true;
                    menuItem11.Text = Pntrnum.ToString();
                    List<int> offsets = new List<int>();
                    br.BaseStream.Position = 0x10;
                    for (int i = 0; i < Pntrnum; i++)
                    {
                        offsets.Add(br.ReadInt32());
                    }
                    Dictionary<int, string> values = new Dictionary<int, string>();
                    for (int i = 0; i < offsets.Count; i++)
                    {
                        int currentOffset = offsets[i];

                        int nextOffset = (i + 1) < offsets.Count ? offsets[i + 1] : (int)br.BaseStream.Length;

                        int stringLength = (nextOffset - currentOffset - 1) / 2;

                        br.BaseStream.Position = currentOffset;

                        var chars = br.ReadChars(stringLength);
                        values.Add(currentOffset, new String(chars));
                    }

                    foreach (int offset in offsets)
                    {
                        listView1.Items.Add(offset.ToString("X")).SubItems.Add(values[offset]);
                    }

                    br.Close();
                    br = null;
            }
        }
        ofd.Dispose();
        ofd = null;
    }

Answer 1

The "SHIFT-JIS" encoding uses single bytes for characters in the ASCII range.

I can see that your text is ASCII, but this line of code:

stringLength = (nextOffset - currentOffset - 1) / 2;

is assuming that the characters are occupying two bytes.

Answer 2

In order to convert binary data to proper string you should know about Encodings. So you can find some useful encodings in System.Text.Encoding. Then you can convert byte array to string like this:

byte[] byteArray = // your byte array
System.Text.Encoding encoding = Encoding.UTF8; //use proper encoding
string value = encoding.GetString(byteArray);

Also you can see the MSDN