Question

I’m working on a bit-based B/W/Greyscale Pre-Compiled font format, and was having issues with either reading or writing the format, (I’ve not been able to determine where the issue was. (I do have a B/W bit-based version working, but an Aliased font doesn’t look too good, as you can imagine, especially when working with a 320×200 pixel screen) ) but decided that just using a BinaryWriter would be much easier than writing to a bool[] when I pulled the image data.

The basic format of a pixel in the file looks like this:

1 – White Pixel (Shortest, as this would be most of the pixels)

00 – Black Pixel (No reason to write 10-bits for a pure black pixel, which there are a reasonable number of)

01 – Greyscale Pixel, and is followed by 1 byte describing the shade of the pixel

Now, everything is fine and dandy with writing the required info, as that’s all full bytes, but the default .Net 4.0 BinaryWriter writes a Boolean value as a full byte, and as you can imagine, that negates the use of a bit-based format. So I was wondering, is there a BinaryWriter, (and BinaryReader) implementation out there that’s bit-based

Edit:
I ended up creating my own. (See the answer for the code.)

Answer 1

I ended up writing my own, so here they are.

The BinaryWriter (I’ve only overridden the ones that I needed)

private class BinaryWriter : System.IO.BinaryWriter
{
    private bool[] curByte = new bool[8];
    private byte curBitIndx = 0;
    private System.Collections.BitArray ba;

    public BinaryWriter(Stream s) : base(s) { }

    public override void Flush()
    {
        base.Write(ConvertToByte(curByte));
        base.Flush();
    }

    public override void Write(bool value)
    {
        curByte[curBitIndx] = value;
        curBitIndx++;

        if (curBitIndx == 8)
        {
            base.Write(ConvertToByte(curByte));
            this.curBitIndx = 0;
            this.curByte = new bool[8];
        }
    }

    public override void Write(byte value)
    {
        ba = new BitArray(new byte[] { value });
        for (byte i = 0; i < 8; i++)
        {
            this.Write(ba[i]);
        }
        ba = null;
    }

    public override void Write(byte[] buffer)
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < buffer.Length; i++)
        {
            this.Write((byte)buffer[i]);
        }
    }

    public override void Write(uint value)
    {
        ba = new BitArray(BitConverter.GetBytes(value));
        for (byte i = 0; i < 32; i++)
        {
            this.Write(ba[i]);
        }
        ba = null;
    }

    public override void Write(ulong value)
    {
        ba = new BitArray(BitConverter.GetBytes(value));
        for (byte i = 0; i < 64; i++)
        {
            this.Write(ba[i]);
        }
        ba = null;
    }

    public override void Write(ushort value)
    {
        ba = new BitArray(BitConverter.GetBytes(value));
        for (byte i = 0; i < 16; i++)
        {
            this.Write(ba[i]);
        }
        ba = null;
    }

    private static byte ConvertToByte(bool[] bools)
    {
        byte b = 0;

        byte bitIndex = 0;
        for (int i = 0; i < 8; i++)
        {
            if (bools[i])
            {
                b |= (byte)(((byte)1) << bitIndex);
            }
            bitIndex++;
        }

        return b;
    }
}

And, the BinaryReader, once again, I’ve only overridden the methods that I needed.

private class BinaryReader : System.IO.BinaryReader
{
    private bool[] curByte = new bool[8];
    private byte curBitIndx = 0;
    private BitArray ba;

    public BinaryReader(Stream s) : base(s)
    {
        ba = new BitArray(new byte[] { base.ReadByte() });
        ba.CopyTo(curByte, 0);
        ba = null;
    }

    public override bool ReadBoolean()
    {
        if (curBitIndx == 8)
        {
            ba = new BitArray(new byte[] { base.ReadByte() });
            ba.CopyTo(curByte, 0);
            ba = null;
            this.curBitIndx = 0;
        }

        bool b = curByte[curBitIndx];
        curBitIndx++;
        return b;
    }

    public override byte ReadByte()
    {
        bool[] bar = new bool[8];
        byte i;
        for (i = 0; i < 8; i++)
        {
            bar[i] = this.ReadBoolean();
        }

        byte b = 0;
        byte bitIndex = 0;
        for (i = 0; i < 8; i++)
        {
            if (bar[i])
            {
                b |= (byte)(((byte)1) << bitIndex);
            }
            bitIndex++;
        }
        return b;
    }

    public override byte[] ReadBytes(int count)
    {
        byte[] bytes = new byte[count];
        for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
        {
            bytes[i] = this.ReadByte();
        }
        return bytes;
    }

    public override ushort ReadUInt16()
    {
        byte[] bytes = ReadBytes(2);
        return BitConverter.ToUInt16(bytes, 0);
    }

    public override uint ReadUInt32()
    {
        byte[] bytes = ReadBytes(4);
        return BitConverter.ToUInt32(bytes, 0);
    }

    public override ulong ReadUInt64()
    {
        byte[] bytes = ReadBytes(8);
        return BitConverter.ToUInt64(bytes, 0);
    }
}