Question

Hey there! I’m trying to read a 150mb file with a file stream but every time I do it all I get is: |zl instead of the whole stream. Note that it has some special characters in it.

Does anybody know what the problem could be? here is my code:

using (FileStream fs = File.OpenRead(path))
{
    byte[] buffer = new byte[fs.Length];
    fs.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);
    extract = Encoding.Default.GetString(buffer);
}

Edit:
I tried to read all text but it still returned the same four characters. It works fine on any other file except for these few. When I use read all lines it only gets the first line.

Answer 1

fs.Read() does not read the whole smash of bytes all at once, it reads some number of bytes and returns the number of bytes read. MSDN has an excellent example of how to use it to get the whole file:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.filestream.read.aspx

For what it’s worth, reading the entire 150MB of data into memory is really going to put a drain on your client’s system — the preferred option would be to optimize it so that you don’t need the whole file all at once.