The following methods of the NFile class lets you create, read and write files:

• Create - creates a file for both reading and writing. If the file already exists it is overwritten.
• Open - opens an existing file or creates a new file for both reading and writing.
• OpenRead - opens a file for reading.
• OpenWrite - opens an existing file or creates a new file for writing.

Since some platforms can't read files synchronously, all of the file manipulation methods mentioned above are asynchronous and work with callbacks. For example, to read the content of a file as an UTF-8 encoded string, you can use the following piece of code:

NFile file = NFileSystem.GetFile(@"C:\Documents\MyFile.txt");
file.OpenRead(
    delegate (Stream stream)
    {
        using (stream)
        {
            byte[] fileData = NStreamHelpers.ReadToEnd(stream);
            string fileContents = NEncoding.UTF8.GetString(fileData);
        }
    },
    delegate (Exception ex)
    {
        // Reading of the file failed
    }
);

NFile provides the following methods to work directly with files:

• ReadAllBytes - reads a file to a byte array.
• WriteAllBytes - writes a byte array to a file.

For example to read a file as UTF-8 encoded string, you can use the following piece of code:

NFile file = NFileSystem.GetFile(@"C:\Documents\MyFile.txt");
file.ReadAllBytes(
    delegate (byte[] fileData)
    {
        string fileContents = NEncoding.UTF8.GetString(fileData);
    },
    delegate (Exception ex)
    {
        // Reading of the file failed
    }
);

These following methods of the NFile class aids you in working with the file system:

• Copy - lets you copy a file.
• Move - lets you move a file, i.e. copy a file to another location and delete the original file.
• Delete - lets you delete a file.
• Exists - lets you check whether a file with a given name exists or not.

The methods above are also available as static methods of the NFile class.

The NFile class provides the following properties:

• Uri - the file URI of the file.
• Path - the full path to the file in the current platform notation, for example "C:\Documents\MyFile.txt". Note that this property can be null for some platforms (like WebAssembly), which do not allow full access to the file system.
• Name - the name of the file without the path information, for example for the file "C:\Documents\MyFile.txt", this method returns "MyFile.txt".
• Extension - the extension of the file without the dot, for example: "txt", "rtf", "docx", etc.
• Attributes - gets/sets the attributes of the file. The value is a flag enum and can contain a mask of one or more values like: ReadOnly, Hidden, System, Archive, etc.
• CreationTime - the time the file was created.
• LastAccessTime - the last time the file was accessed.
• LastWriteTime - the last time the file was written to.