An elegant way to consume (all bytes of a) BinaryReader?

Question

Is there an elegant to emulate the StreamReader.ReadToEnd method with BinaryReader? Perhaps to put all the bytes into a byte array?

I do this:

read1.ReadBytes((int)read1.BaseStream.Length);

...but there must be a better way.

Answer 1

Simply do:

byte[] allData = read1.ReadBytes(int.MaxValue);

The documentation says that it will read all bytes until the end of the stream is reached.

---

Update

Although this seems elegant, and the documentation seems to indicate that this would work, the actual implementation (checked in .NET 2, 3.5, and 4) allocates a full-size byte array for the data, which will probably cause an OutOfMemoryException on a 32-bit system.

Therefore, I would say that actually there isn't an elegant way.

Instead, I would recommend the following variation of @iano's answer. This variant doesn't rely on .NET 4:
Create an extension method for BinaryReader (or Stream, the code is the same for either).

public static byte[] ReadAllBytes(this BinaryReader reader)
{
    const int bufferSize = 4096;
    using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
    {
        byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize];
        int count;
        while ((count = reader.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) != 0)
            ms.Write(buffer, 0, count);
        return ms.ToArray();
    }

}

Answer 2

There is not an easy way to do this with BinaryReader. If you don't know the count you need to read ahead of time, a better bet is to use MemoryStream:

public byte[] ReadAllBytes(Stream stream)
{
    using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
    {
        stream.CopyTo(ms);
        return ms.ToArray();
    }
}

To avoid the additional copy when calling ToArray(), you could instead return the Position and buffer, via GetBuffer().

Answer 3

To copy the content of a stream to another, I've solved reading "some" bytes until the end of the file is reached:

private const int READ_BUFFER_SIZE = 1024;
using (BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(responseStream))
{
    using (BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(File.Open(localPath, FileMode.Create)))
    {
        int byteRead = 0;
        do
        {
            byte[] buffer = reader.ReadBytes(READ_BUFFER_SIZE);
            byteRead = buffer.Length;
            writer.Write(buffer);
            byteTransfered += byteRead;
        } while (byteRead == READ_BUFFER_SIZE);                        
    }                
}

Answer 4

Another approach to this problem is to use C# extension methods:

public static class StreamHelpers
{
   public static byte[] ReadAllBytes(this BinaryReader reader)
   {
      // Pre .Net version 4.0
      const int bufferSize = 4096;
      using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
      {
        byte[] buffer = new byte[bufferSize];
        int count;
        while ((count = reader.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) != 0)
            ms.Write(buffer, 0, count);
        return ms.ToArray();
      }

      // .Net 4.0 or Newer
      using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
      {
         stream.CopyTo(ms);
         return ms.ToArray();
      }
   }
}

Using this approach will allow for both reusable as well as readable code.