Reading a null-terminated string

user_536607 0
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I am reading strings from a binary file. Each string is null-terminated. Encoding is UTF-8. In python I simply read a byte, check if it's 0, append it to a byte array, and continue reading bytes until I see a 0. Then I convert byte array into a string and move on. All of the strings were read correctly.

How can I read this in C#? I don't think I have the luxury of simply appending bytes to an array since the arrays are fixed size.

c#
4 Answers

If your "binary file" only contains null terminated UTF8 strings, then for .NET it isn't a "binary file" but just a text file because null characters are characters too. So you could just use a StreamReader to read the text and split it on the null characters. (Six years later "you" would presumably be some new reader and not the OP.)

A one line (ish) solution would be:

using (var rdr = new StreamReader(path))
    return rdr.ReadToEnd().split(new char[] { '\0' });

But that will give you a trailing empty string if the last string in the file was "properly" terminated.

A more verbose solution that might perform differently for very large files, expressed as an extension method on StreamReader, would be:

List<string> ReadAllNullTerminated(this System.IO.StreamReader rdr)
{
    var stringsRead = new System.Collections.Generic.List<string>();
    var bldr = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
    int nc;
    while ((nc = rdr.Read()) != -1)
    {
        Char c = (Char)nc;
        if (c == '\0')
        {
            stringsRead.Add(bldr.ToString());
            bldr.Length = 0;
        }
        else
            bldr.Append(c);
    }

    // Optionally return any trailing unterminated string
    if (bldr.Length != 0)
        stringsRead.Add(bldr.ToString());

    return stringsRead;
}

Or for reading just one at a time (like ReadLine)

string ReadNullTerminated(this System.IO.StreamReader rdr)
{
    var bldr = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
    int nc;
    while ((nc = rdr.Read()) > 0)
        bldr.Append((char)nc);

    return bldr.ToString();
}
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