String.Trim() doesn't remove whitespaces

Question

I have a small program that loads or saves a byte array from or to a file. In this byte array is contained a string, for example:

byte[] header = new byte[64]; //the actual array is larger, but this is for explaining purposes only...
string savedString = Encoding.ASCII.GetString( header, 0, 64 );

because the string I used to write to the file was only 5 characters long, the "savedString" loads to be "string " etc However, in this situation, I had no worries, I just added

.Trim();

to

Encoding.ASCII.GetString( header, 0, 64 );

yet this still doesn't cut the string down to the right size upon loading, so I'm guessing the padding is not made up of whitespaces?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The byte array is initially filled with zeros, and the the character that represents is a control character, and not a whitespace character. Try specifically trimming these zero-characters like this:

savedString.Trim('\0');

For example:

byte[] header = new byte[64];
header[0] = (byte)'A';
string savedString = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(header, 0, 64);

var output1 = savedString.Trim();
Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1})", output1, output1.Length); // A□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□ (64)
var output2 = savedString.Trim('\0');
Console.WriteLine("{0} ({1})", output2, output2.Length); // A (1)