Declaring an array of char and reading char from Binary Stream

[nick.stefanov]

Hello,

I am trying to read a binary file generated from Ethereal. I need a
structure to hold my frame and one of my variables which stores
source/destination address has to be of type char[6]. In my structure
i cannot figure out how to declare this. Trying char[] dest_addr = new
char[6] but I get an error cannot have instance field initializers in
structs.
If I just delare public char[] dest_addr and then try to read like so
binaryfile.ReadChars(6) what gets stored is System.Char[]. Any help on
how to declare and read is very appriciated.

Nick

 

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

I am trying to read a binary file generated from Ethereal. I need a
structure to hold my frame and one of my variables which stores
source/destination address has to be of type char[6]. In my structure
i cannot figure out how to declare this. Trying char[] dest_addr = new
char[6] but I get an error cannot have instance field initializers in
structs.
If I just delare public char[] dest_addr and then try to read like so
binaryfile.ReadChars(6) what gets stored is System.Char[]. Any help on
how to declare and read is very appriciated.

What do you mean by "what gets stored is System.Char[]"? If you print
out a char array just by doing

Console.WriteLine (myCharArray);

it will indeed print out "System.Char[]". That doesn't mean it doesn't
have the right contents though - try

Console.WriteLine (new string(myCharArray));

instead.

 

[nick.stefanov]

Thanks for your reply,

I have something like this:

char dest = new char[12];
dest = file.ReadChars(12);

MessageBox.Show(new string(dest));


Argument '1': cannot convert from 'char' to 'char*'
Cannot implicitly convert type 'char[]' to 'char'
The best overloaded method match for 'string.String(char*)' has some
invalid arguments
Cannot implicitly convert type 'char[]' to 'char'

Any suggestions?

 

[pepe]

char []dest=file.ReadChars(12);

 

[nick.stefanov]

Tried that and not getting any output using MessageBox.Show(dest) or
MessageBox.Show(new string(dest)).

 

[Jon Skeet [C# MVP]]

Tried that and not getting any output using MessageBox.Show(dest) or
MessageBox.Show(new string(dest)).

Could you post a short but complete program which demonstrates the
problem?

See http://www.pobox.com/~skeet/csharp/complete.html for details of
what I mean by that.