How do I copy the contents of one stream to another?

Question

What is the best way to copy the contents of one stream to another? Is there a standard utility method for this?

Answer 1

Since none of the answers have covered an asynchronous way of copying from one stream to another, here is a pattern that I've successfully used in a port forwarding application to copy data from one network stream to another. It lacks exception handling to emphasize the pattern.

const int BUFFER_SIZE = 4096;

static byte[] bufferForRead = new byte[BUFFER_SIZE];
static byte[] bufferForWrite = new byte[BUFFER_SIZE];

static Stream sourceStream = new MemoryStream();
static Stream destinationStream = new MemoryStream();

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    // Initial read from source stream
    sourceStream.BeginRead(bufferForRead, 0, BUFFER_SIZE, BeginReadCallback, null);
}

private static void BeginReadCallback(IAsyncResult asyncRes)
{
    // Finish reading from source stream
    int bytesRead = sourceStream.EndRead(asyncRes);
    // Make a copy of the buffer as we'll start another read immediately
    Array.Copy(bufferForRead, 0, bufferForWrite, 0, bytesRead);
    // Write copied buffer to destination stream
    destinationStream.BeginWrite(bufferForWrite, 0, bytesRead, BeginWriteCallback, null);
    // Start the next read (looks like async recursion I guess)
    sourceStream.BeginRead(bufferForRead, 0, BUFFER_SIZE, BeginReadCallback, null);
}

private static void BeginWriteCallback(IAsyncResult asyncRes)
{
    // Finish writing to destination stream
    destinationStream.EndWrite(asyncRes);
}