Why Empty Text File Contains 3 bytes?
.net, c#, file, text
Solution
So, those three bytes you are seeing are the byte order marker for the unicode file I am guessing. For UTF-8, it is three bytes.
You can avoid those by saving the file using UTF-8 without signature.
Problem
I'm using a text file inside my C# project in vs2010. I added to solution and set its "Copy Output" to "Copy Always". When I use the following codes, it gives me the text result with leading three bytes or in utf8 one byte. I looked at windows explorers file properties, its size appears 3 bytes. ``` public static string ReadFile(string fileName) { FileStream fs = null; try { fs = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open); FileInfo fi = new FileInfo(fileName); byte[] data = new byte[fi.Length]; fs.Read(data, 0, data.Length); fs.Close(); fs.Dispose(); string text = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(data); return text; } catch (Exception) { if(fs != null) { fs.Close(); fs.Dispose(); } return string.Empty; } } ``` Why is this like above? How can I read text files without StreamReader class? Any helps, codes wil be very appreciated.