HoraceKHering wrote: it shows a little square. That is a display problem. Might or might not be a data problem. You are attempting to 'display' the data that you go via some mechanism so that your eyes can see it. That means that the computer must attempt to take the data and map it to a character set. That involves at least one and perhaps more than one transformation. Any of those can fail in different ways. The surest way to show data is to learn what hex is and then create (or find) code that displays your data in hex. Every character set I have ever looked at will show hex data. (I think even EBCDIC but I could be mistaken and you are really unlikely to have to deal with that.)