Question

I have a byte[] array and want to write it to stdout: Console.Out.Write(arr2str(arr)). How to convert byte[] to string, so that app.exe > arr.txt does the expected thing? I just want to save the array to a file using a pipe, but encodings mess things up.

I’d later want to read that byte array from stdin: app.exe < arr.txt and get the same thing.

How can I do these two things: write and read byte arrays to/from stdin/stdout?

EDIT:

I’m reading with string s = Console.In.ReadToEnd(), and then System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(s). I’m converting from array to string with System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetString(bytes), but this doesn’t work when used with <,>. By “doesn’t work” I mean that writing and reading over a pipe does not return the same thing.

Answer 1

To work with binary files you want Console.OpenStandardInput() to retrieve a Stream that you can read from. This has been covered in other threads here at SO, this one for example: Read binary data from Console.In