How can I add and remove bytes on from the start of a file?

Question

I'm trying to open an existent file save a bytes in the start of it to later read them.

How can I do that? Because the "&" operand isn't working fo this type of data.

I'm using Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("text") to convert info to bytes and then add them.

Help Please.

Answer 1

You cannot add to or remove from the beginning of a file. It just doesn’t work. Instead, you need to read the whole file, and then write a new file with the modified data. (You can, however, replace individual bytes or chunks of bytes in a file without needing to touch the whole file.)

Secondly,

I'm using Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("text") to convert info to bytes and then add them.

You’re doing something wrong. Apparently you’ve read text data from the file and are now trying to convert it to bytes. This is the wrong way of doing it. Do not read text from the file, read the bytes directly (e.g. via My.Computer.FileSystem.ReadAllBytes). Raw byte data and text (i.e. String) are two fundamentally different concepts, do not confuse them. Do not convert needlessly to and fro.