C# 0 The Complete Reference

Reading and Writing Binary Data

So far, we have just been reading and writing bytes or characters, but it is possible—indeed, 

common—to read and write other types of data. For example, you might want to create a 

file that contains the 

int

s,

double

s, or 

short

s. To read and write binary values of the C# 

built-in types, you will use 

BinaryReader

 and 

BinaryWriter

. When using these streams, it is 

important to understand that this data is read and written using its internal, binary format, 

not its human-readable text form.

BinaryWriter

A

BinaryWriter

 is a wrapper around a byte stream that manages the writing of binary data. 

Its most commonly used constructor is shown here:

BinaryWriter(Stream 

outputStream

)

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Here, 

outputStream

 is the stream to which data is written. To write output to a file, you 

can use the object created by 

FileStream

 for this parameter. If 

outputStream

 is null, then 

an