Visual Studio C# - Console outputs incorrect string

Question

When I run my program and open a file it prints the following text in the console:

    File opened successfully
    System.Linq.Enumerable+<TakeIterator>d__25`1[System.Byte]

The first line is correct, but the second line is the one I don't understand. What's intended to happen is that it's supposed to read the first 4 bytes of the file and turn it into a string to print to the console so I can see that it reads the file header correctly. The expected output in this situation would be "MThd", which is the file type identifier.

Here is the code I have for creating the string:

if(fileName != null)
{
    byte[] fileBytes = File.ReadAllBytes(fileName);
    string header = fileBytes.Take(4).ToString();
    Console.WriteLine(header);
}

Answer 1

If you expect a text file, use ReadAllText instead of ReadAllBytes . If you want to read a stream of bytes and interpret that as a string, use the appropriate decoding method, for example

var header = System.Text.UTF8Encoding.UTF8.GetString(fileBytes.Take(4));

With today's multi-byte character sets, it is no longer guaranteed that a certain number of bytes corresponds to a certain number of characters. This is only reliable if you can stick to the ASCII encoding.

var header = System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString(fileBytes.Take(4));

Answer 2

byte[].Take() seems to return something of type

System.Linq.Enumerable+<TakeIterator>d__25``1[System.Byte]

which looks like cannot be converted to a string directly.

Try iterating through it and writing (strings) of its components to the console instead.