ASCII to Binary & Binary to ASCII

Question

Hey everyone,

     I am writing a small app for giggles.  I am writing an app to allow a user to put in ASCII text and convert it to Binary and vice versa.

      Here is everything I'm trying to learn to hopefully teach me some stuff about VB.NET 2005.

1. How can I convert text in a RTB to Binary and vice versa.  For a little info, I have two RTB's: AsciiRTB and BinaryRTB.
2. I want to allow a user to open a .txt file and push text from the .txt file to a RichTextBox.  I want to have 2 open files, i.e. Open -> ASCII File & Open -> Binary, and depending on which one is selected then it will be opened into the corresponding RTB.
   
3. I also want to have a File Save so that users can save the text in the Ascii or the Binary RTB's.

If anyone could help with any piece of this, I would greatly appreciate it.

QWERTYtech

Answer 1

Hi,

 

Answer to your 1st question

 

Dim strText As String = "This is an original string"
Dim btText() As Byte
btText = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(strText)
MessageBox.Show("The total number of encoded bytes is: " & btText.Length.ToString())

You can find more inforamtion on http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=415 

HTH,

Vallari

Answer 2

After using the above code, to do all the work and then show a popup window, how can I make it show the Bytes in a RichTextBox called BinaryRTB????

Answer 3

Hi,

 

I don't if there is any function available but you can use following code

Dim strText As String = "This is an original string"

Dim btText() As Byte

btText = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(strText)

MessageBox.Show("The total number of encoded bytes is: " & btText.Length.ToString())

Dim i As Integer

Dim s As String = ""

For i = 0 To btText.Length - 1

s = s + (btText.GetValue(i).ToString)

Next i

BinaryRTB.Text = s

 

HTH,

Vallari

Answer 4

Vallari,
    Thank you very much for your help... Do you possibly know how to convert from Binary to ASCII????

    Also,
     I put in 'QWERTYtech' to be converted over and the bytes shows to be '81876982848911610199104'.  Whenever I converted it online it only showed 1's and 0's.

    Did I describe something wrong to make me get this output?

QWERTYtech

Answer 5

Hmmm.. sorry this code is converting string to the bytes and not binary ... you need binary.

 

You need to write a function to convert Ascii to binary and binary to ASCII.

Following function converts a character to binary, You can call this function in a loop and get the whole string.

Public Function CharToBinary(ByVal CharStr As String) As String

Dim lValue As Integer

Dim BinaryArr() As String

Dim BinaryStr As String

Dim i As Integer

lValue = Asc(CharStr)

i = 0

ReDim BinaryArr(i)

While lValue <> 0

ReDim Preserve BinaryArr(i)

BinaryArr(i) = lValue Mod 2

lValue = lValue \ 2

i = i + 1

End While

If UBound(BinaryArr) >= 0 Then

For i = 0 To UBound(BinaryArr)

BinaryStr = BinaryArr(i) & BinaryStr

Next

BinaryStr = String.Format("0", 8 - Len(BinaryStr)) & BinaryStr

End If

CharToBinary = BinaryStr

End Function

 

 

Same way for BinarytoAscii write a function value = value + (2 ^ (8- position of the bit))

Answer 6

Sweet.... Is there anyway you could comment this out so I can understand what is all happening???