a question: in DOS programming you can read/write a file in either ascii or binary mode. which mode do the windows functions use? i suppose it detects which mode it needs to use.
also, when i read data from a file, the data usually has both characters (ascii) and numbers (integers). how can i detect if a byte of data is supposed to be an integer rather than a character? i hope you understand my question. i wrote a program to record the ascii number of every byte in a file (using "(int) char"), and the byte that contained the integer 19 returned a 19, is there a way to distiguish this from "DC3," which is the character associated with ascii code 19?