Receiving garbled data when reading a NetworkStream in C#

Question

I'm trying to receive data using a TcpListener in C# . I have the listener working, but when I make a HTTP request to it using my web browser, I just get garbled data when converted to ASCII. It seems like its skipping bytes?

while (client.Connected)
{
    if (stream.ReadByte() != -1)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Recieving data");
        byte[] buf = new byte[0];
        byte data;
        while (stream.ReadByte() != -1)
        {
            data = (byte) stream.ReadByte();
            Console.Write("{0} ", data.ToString("x"));
            buf.Append(data);
        }
        dataRecieved(buf);
    }
}

Output:

54 2f 48 54 2f 2e d 48 73 3a 6c 63 6c 6f 74 38 38 d 43 6e 65 74 6f 3a 6b 65 2d 6c 76 d 43 63 65 43 6e 72 6c 20 61 2d 67 3d d 55 67 61 65 49 73 63 72 2d 65 75 73 73 20 d 55 65 2d 67 6e 3a 4d 7a 6c 61 35 30 28 69 64 77 20 54 31 2e 3b 57 6e 34 20 36 29 41 70 65 65 4b 74 35 37 33 20 4b 54 4c 20 69 65 47 63 6f 20 68 6f 65 31 33 30 35 36 2e 33 20 61 61 69 35 37 33 d 41 63 70 2d 61 67 61 65 20 6e 55 d 41 63 70 3a 74 78 2f 74 6c 61 70 69 61 69 6e 78 74 6c 78 6c 61 70 69 61 69 6e 78 6c 71 30 39 69 61 65 61 69 2c 6d 67 2f 65 70 69 61 65 61 6e 2c 2f 3b 3d 2e 2c 70 6c 63 74 6f 2f 69 6e 64 65 63 61 67 3b 3d 33 71 30 39 a 65 2d 50 3a 31 a 65 2d 65 63 2d 69 65 20 6f 65 a 65 2d 65 63 2d 6f 65 20 61 69 61 65 a 65 2d 65 63 2d 73 72 20 31 a 65 2d 65 63 2d 65 74 20 6f 75 65 74 a 63 65 74 45 63 64 6e 3a 67 69 2c 64 66 61 65 20 72 a a

Any ideas on how to make this work?

Answer 1

It is likely that you are getting UTF8 Data from the stream. You will have to deal with the encoding

Try something like this.

private string ReadUTF8String(Stream stream)
{
    using var ms = new MemoryStream();
    var buffer = new byte[4096];
    int readCount;
    while ((readCount = stream.Read(buffer)) > 0)
    {
        ms.Write(buffer, 0, readCount);
    }

    return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ms.ToArray());
}


while (client.Connected)
{
    if (stream.ReadByte() != -1)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Recieving data");
        string result = ReadUTF8String(stream);
        Console.Write(result);
    }
}