An Elegant Way to Consume (All Bytes of A) Binaryreader

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

Original Answer (Read Update Below!)

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.

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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();
    }
    
}

(F#) Smoothest way to read all bytes from a CryptoStream

Draining stream byte by byte will be very slow.

if you have .NET 4.0 then the most straightforward way will be:

open System.IO

let readAllBytes (s : Stream) = 
    let ms = new MemoryStream()
    s.CopyTo(ms)
    ms.ToArray()

else you need to reproduce CopyTo functionality manually

let readAllBytes (s : Stream) =
    let ms = new MemoryStream()
    let buf = Array.zeroCreate 8192
    let rec impl () = 
        let read = s.Read(buf, 0, buf.Length) 
        if read > 0 then 
            ms.Write(buf, 0, read)
            impl ()
    impl ()

What is the correct way to read from a NetStream through a BinaryReader?

BinaryReader.Read(byte[], int, int) just forwards the call to the underlying stream. The semantics are the same. For this scenario, however, there is also the helper method BinaryReader.ReadBytes(int) which reads a specific number of bytes, so you don't have to keep track of how many bytes have been read yourself.

BinaryReader Skipping Ahead In Position

Oh I feel stupid, I must need to take a break or get a coffee. The problem was I was advancing the position for a comparison and not resetting it if it failed.

if (Binary.ReadByte().ToString("X2") == "D9")

Was advancing it the one byte and returning false, so I just needed to add and else saying

Binary.BaseStream.Position--;

BinaryReader on MemoryStream stay empty

Since you just wrote to the MemoryStream, the pointer is at the end where there is nothing to read. Reset the position back to 0 (zero) before attempting to read from it:

    mStream.Position = 0

C# BinaryReader notably slower. Alternative?

You have all the data upfront in an array in memory whereas BinaryReader streams the bytes in one at a time from the source which I guess is a file on disk. I guess you could speed it up by passing it a stream that reads from an in-memory array:

Stream stream = new MemoryStream(byteArray);
//Pass the stream to BinaryReader

Note that with this approach you need to fill the entire file in memory at once but I guess that's ok for you.

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