Skip Leading Bytes When Writing Attachment Content Stream To File On The Disc

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Hi all,
I'm facing a problem with saving attachment content stream to a file, the problem is that the saved files contains leading bytes, specifically in my case three question marks ??? .
The problem seems simple but i'm not sure what is behind it , is it BOM (Byte Order Mark) written to the file or is it prefix length of the stream ?
I've tried several ways , but with all had the same results:
Here is my used methods:
First one:

C#

public void saveAttachment(System.Net.Mail.Attachment attachment)
        {
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(attachment.ContentStream);
            File.WriteAllText(attachment.Name, reader.ReadToEnd());
        }

Second one (similar to the first):

C#

public void saveAttachment(System.Net.Mail.Attachment attachment)
        {
            StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(attachment.Name);
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(attachment.ContentStream);
            writer.Write(reader.ReadToEnd());
            writer.Close();
        }

Third method based on the link :

C#

public void saveMailAttachment(System.Net.Mail.Attachment attachment)
{
    byte[] allBytes = new byte[attachment.ContentStream.Length];

    int bytesRead = attachment.ContentStream.Read(allBytes, 0, (int)attachment.ContentStream.Length);

    string destinationFile = attachment.Name;

    BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(new FileStream(destinationFile, FileMode.OpenOrCreate, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None));
    writer.Write(allBytes);
    writer.Close();
}

I tried playing with the bytes array , but i don't think it's a very reliable way to solve the problem , any help would be very appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Posted 9-Sep-14 2:38am

Hazem Albezreh

Updated 9-Sep-14 2:39am

v2

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Nathan Minier · Answer 1 · 2014-09-09T03:58:00

Solution 1

If you always have 3, and exactly 3, marker characters at the start of the file, there's a very easy way to implement this based on your second implementation:

C#

public void saveAttachment(System.Net.Mail.Attachment attachment)
{
    using(var writer = new StreamWriter(attachment.Name))
    {
        using(var reader = new StreamReader(attachment.ContentStream))
        {
            // Set the stream pointer
            reader.BaseStream.Seek(3, SeekOrigin.Begin);
            writer.Write(reader.Read());
            writer.Close();
        }
    }
}

Dispose logic included free of charge. :)

Posted 9-Sep-14 3:58am

Nathan Minier

Comments

Hazem Albezreh 9-Sep-14 11:09am

Hey Nathan,
Thanks for your respond, now i have more insights about the problem , I'm using the following code :

<pre lang="cs">public void saveAttachment(System.Net.Mail.Attachment attachment)
{
using (var fileStream = File.Create("C:\\"+attachment.Name))
{

attachment.ContentStream.CopyTo(fileStream);
}

}</pre>

I'm facing the problem with text files or xml files or custom extension textual files , some characters are converted to ? by the reader stream, and it's not always three.
I'm not sure if the problem related to encoding .
I'm still working on it.