Hi,
i have this piece of code, the encoding function creates a file of binary 1's and 0's but since i am getting output in a text file, the result is shown as ASCII characters which appear as garbage. can anyone please tell me what should i add in the encode function, so that i get binary in the file rather than ascii. I am attaching the code. please only see the encoding part, the decoding part works fine.
thanks
Hint only: what is the difference between a character with value zero, and a character that displays as a zero ('0') on screen?
Presumably if you correct the encoding, you will also need to adjust the decoding.
My guess is there is nothing wrong with writing binary data to a text file. The flaw is letting NOTEPAD or whatever display the data and interpreting it as ASCII. Hence the garbage appearance. If your encode / decode is correct, you should be able to retrieve the correct data from the file regardless of how garbagey it looks in the screen.
Instead of looking at the file with a text editor, try a hex editor.
That's not true. If you open a file in text mode, then some characters may be translated between call and write. A common one is expanding newline to newline plus carriage return. Also, if you write 26 (Control Z), on some systems that will be intepreted as end of file.
So you must open a file with "wb" before writing binary data, or you may get strange results.
I'm the author of MiniBasic: How to write a script interpreter and Basic Algorithms
Visit my website for lots of associated C programming resources.
https://github.com/MalcolmMcLean
This is true for Windows OSes; I think it is false for most Unix Like OSes.Originally Posted by Malcolm McLean
It one of the things you need to watch for when converting code from Linux to Windows.
Tim S.
"...a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are,in short, a perfect match.." Bill Bryson
Unix-like OSes treat text mode files and binary mode files the exact same way.
Using binary mode when not dealing with text is, nevertheless, a good idea TM no matter the OS in use.
