Re: Reading an Ascii string

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Check out the System.Text Namespace, specifically the Encoding, Encoder, and
Decoder classes.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
Professional Chicken Salad Alchemist

Big thicks are made up of lots of little thins.


"John" <-> wrote in message news:OMR74pooGHA.3304@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hi,

I'm a beginner is using C# and .net.

I have big legacy files that stores various values (ints, bytes, strings)
and want to read them into
a C# programme so that I can store them in a database. The files are
written by a late 1980's PC
Pascal programme, for which I don't have the source code. I've managed to
reverse engineer the file
format.

The strings are stored as Ascii in the file, with the first byte
indicating the string length, and
the rest are the Ascii (ie 8-bit) characters. The string length is always
0, 20 or 40 characters
(never any more) and strings are end-padded with space characters where
necessary.

What is the best way to quickly read a string and get rid of the space
padding at the end? To make
sure I can read them correctly, I'll put them in a text box. I assume the
string used in a test box
uses 16-bit characters (unicode?) but I may be wrong here. When I'm happy
I can read them correctly,
I'll get rid of the text box and store them directly in the database. Is
it best to store it in the
database as unicode? I'm tempted to use Ascii for efficiency.

I was thinking of using a binary reader (_br) to extract from the file.
That should be fine for
everything, but I don't know how to cope the the Ascii strings.




.

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