Python/C#, Reading File into Byte Array - Not Quite the Same Result - c#

I'm attempting to read a file and process it in both C# and IronPython, but I'm running into a slight problem.
When I read the file in either language, I get a byte array that's almost identical, but not quite.
For instance, the array has 1552 bytes. They're all the same except for one thing. Any time the value "10" appears in the Python implementation, the value "13" appears in the C# implementation. Aside from that, all other bytes are the same.
Here's roughly what I'm doing to get the bytes:
Python:
f = open('C:\myfile.blah')
contents = f.read()
bytes = bytearray(contents, 'cp1252')
C#:
var bytes = File.ReadAllBytes(#"C:\myfile.blah");
Perhaps I'm choosing the wrong encoding? Though I wouldn't think so, since the Python implementation behaves as I would expect and processes the file successfully.
Any idea what's going on here?

(I don't know python) But it looks like you need to pass the 'rb' flag:
open('C:\myfile.blah', 'rb')
Reference:
On Windows, 'b' appended to the mode opens the file in binary mode, so
there are also modes like 'rb', 'wb', and 'r+b'. Python on Windows
makes a distinction between text and binary files; the end-of-line
characters in text files are automatically altered slightly when data
is read or written.
Note that the values 10 and 13 give clues as to what the problem is:
Line feed is 10 in decimal and Carriage return is 13 in decimal.

Related

reading binary files with R

I have to translate a project from c# to R. In this c# project i have to handle binary files.
I have three problems:
1.I am having some issues to convert this code:
//c#
//this work fine
using (BinaryReader rb = new BinaryReader(archive.Entries[0].Open())){
a = rb.ReadInt32();
b = rb.ReadInt32();
c = rb.ReadDouble();
}
#R
#this work, but it reads different values
#I tried to change the size in ReadBin, but it's the same story. The working diretory is the right one
to.read <- "myBinaryFile.tmp"
line1<-c(readBin(to.read,"integer",2),
readBin(to.read,"double",1))
How can I read float (in c# i have rb.ReadSingle()) in R?
Is there in R a function to memorize the position that you have arrived when you are reading a binary file? So next time you will read it again, you could skip what you have already read (as in c# with BinaryReader)
Answering your questions directly:
I am having some issues to convert this code...
What is the problem here? Your code block contains the comment "but it's the same story", but what is the story? You haven't explained anything here. If your problem is with the double, you should try setting readBin(..., size = 8). In your case, your code would read line1 <- c(readBin(to.read,"integer", 2), readBin(to.read, "double", 1, 8)).
How can I read float (in c# i have rb.ReadSingle()) in R?
Floats are 4 bytes in size in this case (I would presume), so set size = 4 in readBin().
Is there in R a function to memorize the position that you have arrived when you are reading a binary file? So next time you will read it again, you could skip what you have already read (as in c# with BinaryReader)
As far as I know there is nothing available (more knowledgeable people are welcome to add their inputs). You could, however, easily write a wrapper script for readBin() that does this for you. For instance, you could specify how many bytes you want to discard (i.e., this can correspond to n bytes that you have already read into R), and read in that many bytes via a dummy readBin() like so readBin(con = yourinput, what = "raw", n = n), where the integer n would indicate the number of bytes you wish to throw away. Thereafter, you could have your wrapper script go read succeeding bytes into a variable of your choice.

Anybody have experience reading ISOBUS (ISO 11783-10) binary timelog files?

I am trying to open and read a bunch of geo-referenced timelog files that are in binary format. They supposedly follow the ISO-11783 (ISOBUS) standard for agricultural machinery, but after reading 100s of pages of the standard I cannot figure out how to read the files either with a hex editor or programmatically with .NET c#. I know the timelog comes in file-pairs: an xml file and a binary file. The binary file, for example, is named TLG00004.bin and in notepad it looks like this (partial):
and when I open that file in Visual Studio 2015 (Community) as a binary file the hex looks like this:
which does not help me. I don't even know how to begin reading this as a byte stream in code (or anything else for that matter).
I know the file is supposed to look like this in human readable form:
(TimeStart, PositionNorth, PositionEast, PositionStatus, # DLV, DLV 0, PDV 0, DLV 1, PDV 1, DLV 2, PDV 2,...) it can have up to 255 DLV-PDV pairs which I believe are 32-bit integers. An example was shown as: (2005-05-02T16:32:00,51.00678,6.03489,1,2,0,10,1,15)
Little hints I have seen in the documentation indicate to me this must be utf-8 and perhaps base64 encoding with little endian and no Byte Order Mark. But I tried opening this in the free version of Hexinator and can't (human) read it using any of the dozens of encodings in that app, including utf-8, 16, 32...
I know this is not normal programming stuff but am throwing it out there to see if I'm lucky enough that someone has done this before and sees this. Any hints or resource-pointing would find me grateful, and I would be very thankful if someone can share any code that reads this kind of file.
Your data seems to follow the ISO 11783-10 standard for "Log data binary file structure" data exchange.
You will need to unpack your binary data into data types according to the specification. For example, the first 32 bits of the data are the milliseconds since midnight stored as a 32 bit unsigned integer. The next 16 bits are the days since 1980-01-01 stored as a 16 bit unsigned integer.
Unpacking binary data is programming language specific and some programming languages have useful libraries to assist in shifting through binary data.
As your question is about the general parsing of ISOBUS and I'm not proficient in your given language (C#), I can only give you an initial pointer.
BinaryReader looks to be the ideal way of unpacking a binary file by reading a number of bits from a stream and advancing the pointer through it:
using (BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(File.Open(fileName, FileMode.Open)))
{
milliSecondsSinceMidnight = reader.ReadUInt32();
daysSince1980 = reader.ReadUInt16();
}
If you need further help, you can now ask a specific question about byte parsing in C#.

Custom archive format File Reading

C#.NET 4.0
I'm having an interesting problem here with reading a custom file archive format. In C#, I wrote a program that creates an archive header (some overhead info about the archive as a whole, number of files, those kinds of things). It then takes an input file to be stored, reads and bytes, and then writes some overhead about the file (filename, type, size and such) and then the actual file data. I can also extract files from the archive through this program. To test it, I stored a png image and extracted it by reading the filesize from the overhead and then allocating an array of bytes of that size, pulled the filedata into that array, and then wrote it with a streamwriter. No big deal, worked fine. Now, we go to the C++ side...
C++
My C++ program needs to read the filedata in, determine the filetype, and then pass it off to the appropriate processing class. The processing classes were giving errors, which they shouldn't have. So I decided to write the filedata out fro the C++ program after reading it using fwrite(), and the resulting file appears to be damaged? In a nutshell, this is the code being used to read the file...
unsigned char * data = 0;
char temp = 0;
__int64 fileSize = 0;
fread(&fileSize, sizeof(__int64), 1, _fileHandle);
data = new unsigned char[fileSize];
for (__int64 i = 0; i < fileSize; i++)
{
fread(&temp, 1, 1, _fileHandle);
data[i] = temp;
}
(I'm at work right now, so I just wrote this from memory. However, I'm 99% positive it's accurate to my code at home. I'm also not concerned with non MS Standards at the moment, so please bear with the __int64.)
I haven't gone through all 300 something thousand bytes to determine if everything is consistent, but the first 20 or so bytes that I looked at appear to be correct. I don't exactly see why there is a problem. Is there something funny about fread()? I also to double check the file in the archive, removed all the archive overhead and saved just the image data to a new png image with notepad, which worked fine.
Should I be reading this differently? Is there something wrong with using fread() to read in this data?
Given that the first n bytes appear to be correct, did you by chance forget to open the file in binary mode ("rb")? If you didn't then it's helpfully converting any sequences of \r\n into \n for you which would obviously not be what you want.
Since this question is tagged C++ did you consider using the canonical C++ approach of iostreams rather than the somewhat antiquated FILE* streams from C?

How to write a file format handler

Today i'm cutting video at work (yea me!), and I came across a strange video format, an MOD file format with an companion MOI file.
I found this article online from the wiki, and I wanted to write a file format handler, but I'm not sure how to begin.
I want to write a file format handler to read the information files, has anyone ever done this and how would I begin?
Edit:
Thanks for all the suggestions, I'm going to attempt this tonight, and I'll let you know. The MOI files are not very large, maybe 5KB in size at most (I don't have them in front of me).
You're in luck in that the MOI format at least spells out the file definition. All you need to do is read in the file and interpret the results based on the file definition.
Following the definition, you should be able to create a class that could read and interpret a file which returns all of the file format definitions as properties in their respective types.
Reading the file requires opening the file and generally reading it on a byte-by-byte progression, such as:
using(FileStream fs = File.OpenRead(path-to-your-file)) {
while(true) {
int b = fs.ReadByte();
if(b == -1) {
break;
}
//Interpret byte or bytes here....
}
}
Per the wiki article's referenced PDF, it looks like someone already reverse engineered the format. From the PDF, here's the first entry in the format:
Hex-Address: 0x00
Data Type: 2 Byte ASCII
Value (Hex): "V6"
Meaning: Version
So, a simplistic implementation could pull the first 2 bytes of data from the file stream and convert to ASCII, which would provide a property value for the Version.
Next entry in the format definition:
Hex-Address: 0x02
Data Type: 4 Byte Unsigned Integer
Value (Hex):
Meaning: Total size of MOI-file
Interpreting the next 4 bytes and converting to an unsigned int would provide a property value for the MOI file size.
Hope this helps.
If the files are very large and just need to be streamed in, I would create a new reader object that uses an unmanagedmemorystream to read the information in.
I've done a lot of different file format processing like this. More recently, I've taken to making a lot of my readers more functional where reading tends to use 'yield return' to return read only objects from the file.
However, it all depends on what you want to do. If you are trying to create a general purpose format for use in other applications or create an API, you probably want to conform to an existing standard. If however you just want to get data into your own application, you are free to do it however you want. You could use a binaryreader on the stream and construct the information you need within your app, or get the reader to return objects representing the contents of the file.
The one thing I would recommend. Make sure it implements IDisposable and you wrap it in a using!

Printing time to binary file in C# .net

I got this next problem.
I have a binary file, which I write to it vital data of the system.
One of the fields is time, which I use DateTime.Now.ToString("HHmmssffffff), in format of microseconds. This data (in a string) I convert (to ToCahrArray) (and checked it in debugging in it is fine), it consists of time valid till the microseconds.
Then I write it and flush it to the file. When opening it with PsPad that translate binary to Ascii, I see that data is corrupted in this field and a nother one but the rest of the message is fine.
The code:
void Write(string strData) {
char[] cD = strData.ToCharArry();
bw.Write(c); //br is from type of BinaryWriter
bw.Flush();
}
You're writing out the bytes in Unicode characters, not Ascii bytes. If you want Ascii bytes, you should change this to use the Encoding class.
byte[] data = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(strData);
bw.Write(data);
I strongly recommend reading Joel Spolsky's article on character sets and encoding. It may help you understand what your current code is not working properly.

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