C＃向/从控制台读取/写入字节

Question

I have a byte[] array and want to write it to stdout: Console.Out.Write(arr2str(arr)) . How to convert byte[] to string, so that app.exe > arr.txt does the expected thing? I just want to save the array to a file using a pipe, but encodings mess things up.

I'd later want to read that byte array from stdin: app.exe < arr.txt and get the same thing.

How can I do these two things: write and read byte arrays to/from stdin/stdout?

EDIT:

I'm reading with string s = Console.In.ReadToEnd() , and then System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(s) . I'm converting from array to string with System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetString(bytes) , but this doesn't work when used with < , > . By "doesn't work" I mean that writing and reading over a pipe does not return the same thing.

Answer 1

To work with binary files you want Console.OpenStandardInput() to retrieve a Stream that you can read from. This has been covered in other threads here at SO, this one for example: Read binary data from Console.In

Answer 2

If you are writing to Console.WriteLine you need to encode the text in to a printable format. If you want to output to a file as a binary you can't use Console.WriteLine

If you still need to output to the console you either need to open the raw stream with Console.OpenStandardOutput() or call Convert.ToBase64String to turn the byte array to a string. There is also Convert.FromBase64String to come back from base64 to a byte array.