File component

y offs et · Post by **y offs et** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 8:56 pm

encoding:- figured out the char OK, however how the binary works remains a mystery.

Post by **Kjell** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 9:34 pm

What are you trying to do exactly? The File Component by itself doesn't do much .. regardless of character / binary encoding.

Char: One byte is read at a time. The value read is an integer between 0 and 255 (the ascii-value of the character in a text file).
Binary: Four bytes is read at a time. This can be used to read variables with the full decimal precision.

Rule of thumb is when you work with "readable" data ( stuff you'd do in notepad ) you should go with char, while you'd want to use binary for anything else ( data you would use a hex editor for ).

K

y offs et · Post by **y offs et** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 10:09 pm

It sure doesn't do much. I got some interesting results with this test. How it might be useful, I don't know.

Edit - #2 might be more interesting to someone.

Post by **Kjell** » Sat Dec 12, 2009 11:18 pm

So ... what's the problem again?

In the first test you're reading what appears to be a char encoded file ( bbbbaaaa ) using binary encoding, casting the bytes to a float.

In the second you're doing the same, but also write the content back to a file .. which results in a copy of the original file.

Both seem perfectly normal, even though I don't see any practical use for such char / binary conversions .. but maybe I'm missing something?

K

y offs et · Post by **y offs et** » Sun Dec 13, 2009 4:24 am

No problem. Just me poking around, figuring how these things work.