Not sure why my reader won't read my text file

Question

I have the following code to read a file in the root directory of my application. For some reason, no matter how many runs, my file is still not being read. Any idea what I could be doing wrong here please. Thanks in advance.

byte[] mybytes = null;
if (File.Exists(filename))
{
    using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(new FileStream(filename, 
                               FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read)))
    {
        String input;
        StringBuilder tempstore = new StringBuilder();
        while ((input  = sr.ReadLine()) != null)
        {
            tempstore.Append(input);
        }
        mybytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(tempstore.ToString());
        sr.Close();
    }
}

Answer 1

Have you tried File.ReadAllText(filename); ?

It's easier.

Answer 2

ReadLine should only be used with text files. If your file is binary it could have a ^Z character at the beginning.. making the library think that it reached the EOF.

Answer 3

Your code works for me if I copy it verbatim, add my own filename variable and run it. Is it possible that the value of filename is not a valid file path on your machine?

Answer 4

Have you tried File.ReadAllBytes?

        byte[] mybytes = File.ReadAllBytes(filename);

Answer 5

Are you sure the filename actually exists? That is really the most likely thing that could be the problem based on the code you've listed.