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POC# - Reading bytes, what are they and what's going on. I expect binary values, not decimal numbers
 

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  1. POC# - Reading bytes, what are they and what's going on. I expect binary values, not decimal numbers
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    <p>I've been a programmer for a few years now, but I've never <em>had</em> to understand low-level operations involving bytes. It interests me however, and I would like to understand more about working with bytes.</p> <p>In the below code I'm reading a text file that contains only the words "hi there".</p> <pre><code> FileStream fileStream = new FileStream(@"C:\myfile.txt", FileMode.Open); byte[] mybyte = new byte[fileStream.Length]; fileStream.Read(mybyte, 0, (int)fileStream.Length); foreach(byte b in mybyte) Console.Write(b); Console.ReadLine(); </code></pre> <p>In this case, the mybyte variable contains numeric values that appear to represent the ASCII decimal counterpart. However, I thougth bytes represent bits, which in turn represnt binary values. When reading a byte I would expect to see a binary value like '0001010', not '104' which is the ascii character for 'h'.</p> <p>In the case of reading an image, when reading the image into a byte array I once again see numbers in the array, and from a low-level persepctive I would expect binary values. I know that these numbers obviously don't map to Ascii, but I'm confused why when reading a string they would map to ascii numbers and when reading an image stream it does something else (I'm not actually sure what the numbers represent in the case of reading an image).</p> <p>I know understanding what the numbers mean in a byte array isn't critical, but it greatly interests me.</p> <p>Could someone please shed a light on bytes in the .net framework when reading from a text file and when reading binary (i.e. image). Thank You</p> <p><em>This image is the byte array holding the text "hi there" read from myfile.txt</em> <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/0LCOV.jpg" alt="Byte array of the myfile.txt file. Values map to &quot;hi there&quot;"> <em>This image is a byte array holding an image stream</em> <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/zvph4.jpg" alt="enter image description here"></p>
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      1. USSergi Papaseit
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    1. COIt's arbitrary and you can change the representation in your settings. Most of the time you want to see a number represented in decimal because it's just easier to read (I don't care to bust out a calculator when looking at a variable in the debugger), but a number's a number. You could represent it in base 104 as 1 if you really wanted to.
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      1. POC# - Reading bytes, what are they and what's going on. I expect binary values, not decimal numbers
      1. USEd S.
    2. COI believe you need to start with a book on computer science fundamentals. Your question shows that although you know how to program, you have very little understand why programs work, and this is a bit dangerous because you then won't understand why they fail.
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      1. POC# - Reading bytes, what are they and what's going on. I expect binary values, not decimal numbers
      1. USStephen Chung
    3. COYou do realize that a binary numbers and decimal numbers are all the *same* numbers, right?
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      1. POC# - Reading bytes, what are they and what's going on. I expect binary values, not decimal numbers
      1. USGabe
 

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