[RESOLVED] 2k5 StreamWriter problem

[crptcblade]

When I write out to a file, 3 weird characters are appended to the beginning of it. When I look at the string, or the bytes in the immediate window, I just see the normal characters that I would expect. Anybody else hit this problem? If so, is there a solution?

[jcis]

Which characters are acting like that? Any character?
Your code looks like this?

Dim sw As StreamWriter = New StreamWriter("C:\MyFile.txt")
    sw.Write("!·$%&/()=»)12345678" & vbNewLine)
    sw.Close()
    sw = Nothing

[penagate]

Is it Unicode?

[crptcblade]

Its not that its changing characters, its prepending them to the beginning of the string that I write to the file.

My code looks pretty much like this...

Dim sw As StreamWriter = My.Computer.FileSystem.OpenTextFileWriter("c:\test.txt")

  sw.WriteLine(someText)
  sw.Close()

They are the same characters everytime I run it, and they don't show up when you view the text file through notepad, or even VS. But if you look at it in hex, you see them.

[penagate]

Well if it's Unicode then what you are seeing is almost certainly the Byte Order Mark, which is prepended to most Unicode files. The BOM dictates whether the characters should be read in little-endian or big-endian format.

[jcis]

By default OpenTextFileWriter should use ASCII encoding, as it's explained here, but as Penagate said, thats a common behavior of Unicode. Try setting the 3rd parameter of OpenTextFileWriter to unicode.

[crptcblade]

It shouldn't be unicode, though. There are no extended characters in the text. There should be no problem writing it as ASCII.