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Asked: 2026-05-11T03:11:06+00:00

When trying to display a byte stream from HLDS (Half-Life Dedicated Server) in a

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When trying to display a byte stream from HLDS (Half-Life Dedicated Server) in a textbox, it displays strange blocky question mark characters that look something like this:

[?]

Here’s a sample line from the byte stream (with [?] in place of the strange character):

CPU   In    Out   Uptime  Users   FPS    Players[?] 0.00  0.97  0.91    2806   182  297.25       1[?]

Here is how I display the byte stream as a string:

byte[] bytes = listener.Receive(ref sender); // get bytes from stream TextBox1.Text = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(bytes, 0, bytes.Length); // write to textbox

The characters are appearing where [CR][LF] should normally appear. Why is it showing strange characters, and what can I do to remove the weird characters or correct the encoding?

***** UPDATE *****

Jon Skeet provided the right answer. The logs are returning \n for newline (not \r\n) and \0 at the end of each log line streamed. Replaced \n with Environment.NewLine and \0 with string.Empty and the strange characters are gone. Thank you Jon.

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1 Answer

  1. Firstly, I believe that if textboxes ever receive a character 0, they will assume that’s the end of data – you may want to guard against that specifically.

    Where does your byte stream come from? What encoding is it meant to be? What are the bytes at that point in the data?

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