Write all bits in C#

Question

Hi How can i write all bits of a file using c#? For example writing 0 to all bits

Please provide me with a sample

Answer 1

read into a byte and then test against >= powers of 2 to get each of the bits in that byte

Answer 2

Have a look at System.IO.FileInfo; you'll need to open a writable stream for the file you're interested in and then write however many bytes (with value 0 in your example) to it as there are in the file already (which you can ascertain via FileInfo.Length). Be sure to dispose of the stream once you're done with it – using constructs are useful for this purpose.

Answer 3

Consider using the BinaryWriter available in the .NET framework

using(BinaryWriter binWriter =
            new BinaryWriter(File.Open(fileName, FileMode.Create)))
        {
            binWriter.Write("Hello world");

        }

Answer 4

Definitely has the foul stench of homework to it.

Hint - Think why someone might want to do this. Just deleting the file and replacing with a file of 0s of the correct length might not be what you're after.

Answer 5

I'm not sure why you'd want to do this, but this will overwrite a file with data that is the same length but contains byte values of zero:

File.WriteAllBytes(filePath, new byte[new FileInfo(filePath).Length]);

Answer 6

When you say write all bits to a file I'll assume you mean bits as in nyble, bit, byte. That's just writing an integer to a file. You can't have a 4 bit file as far as I know so the smallest denomination will be a byte.

You probably don't want to be responsible for serializing yourself, so your easiest option would be to use the BinaryReader and BinaryWriter classes, and then manipulate the bits inside your C#.

The BinaryWriter class uses a 4 byte integer as minimum however. For example

writer.Write( 1 ); // 01  
writer.Write( 10 ); // 0a  
writer.Write( 100 ); // 64  
writer.Write( 1000 ); // 3e8  
writer.Write( 10000 ); // 2710  
//writer.Write( 123456789 ); // 75BCD15

is written to file as

01 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 64 00 00 00 e8 03 00 00 10 27 00 00 15 cd 5b 07