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Why does this code not write my string to the file:

 string file = "Myfile.txt"; MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(); void writeToFile(string text) { System.Text.ASCIIEncoding encoding=new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding(); byte[] barr = encoding.GetBytes(text); ms.Write(barr, 0, barr.Length); using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(file, FileMode.OpenOrCreate)) { using (BinaryWriter bw = new BinaryWriter(ms)) { bw.Write(ms.ToArray()); } } } static void Main(string[] args) { Program p = new Program(); p.writeToFile("Tony Test"); Console.ReadLine(); }
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  • what actually happens? Error, empty file? Commented Jul 15, 2010 at 9:26

4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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Look at this line:

using (BinaryWriter bw = new BinaryWriter(ms))

You're writing back to the MemoryStream. You want:

using (BinaryWriter bw = new BinaryWriter(fs))

Having said that, this is a pretty nasty way of writing to a file, with all kinds of unnecessary steps. Hopefully this was just experimentation trying to work out why something else wasn't working - but if your real code is actually like this, please give details of what you're trying to do and we can help you tidy it up.

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4 Comments

This is copied from a piece of production code, not written by me, that was failing to write to the file and I was attempting to debug it. Could you just tell me what is nasty about it? It really is supposed to take a memorystream and write the contents (a string) to a file...
This code forces the process to copy all of the contents of the MemoryStream (with theToArray() call). See e.g. stackoverflow.com/questions/230128/… for better methods.
Thanks, so what does the ToArray call copy more then the method provided in your link?
@Tony: Use MemoryStream.WriteTo to do this in a much nicer fashion... and you don't need a BinaryWriter either. The code to populate the memory stream is somewhat wasteful too.
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You are using the MemoryStream ms for both input and output. Change the line

using (BinaryWriter bw = new BinaryWriter(ms))

to

using (BinaryWriter bw = new BinaryWriter(fs))
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0

Alternatively:

File.WriteAllText("myfile", "mytext");
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You are writing to text wtih the hardest way possible. you should use File.WriteAllText (as Adam says) or Append text method. If you want to use a writer with special encoding than you should use StreamWriter, since it works with text data and you can set the Encoding of the file.

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