A while back I had to read string data written by .NET's BinaryWriter in C++. I was initially a little bit confused about how the data was written but after using Reflector it turned out that the write method prefixes the string with a 7-bit encoded integer.

The encoded integer indicates the length of the written string, and is more commonly known as UTF-7 encoding.

The short example below shows how the string length can be read from a standard input stream.

int32_t BinaryReader::read7BitEncodedInteger(ifstream* stream)
{
    char current;
    int32_t index = 0, result = 0;
    do
    {
        stream->read((char*)&current, sizeof(char));
        result |= (current & 127) << index;
        index += 7;
    }
    while((current & 128) != 0);
    return result;
}