It really depends on whether or not you can trust s.Length
. For many streams, you just don't know how much data there will be. In such cases - and before .NET 4 - I'd use code like this:
public static byte[] ReadFully(Stream input)
{
byte[] buffer = new byte[16*1024];
using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
int read;
while ((read = input.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
{
ms.Write(buffer, 0, read);
}
return ms.ToArray();
}
}
With .NET 4 and above, I'd use Stream.CopyTo
, which is basically equivalent to the loop in my code - create the MemoryStream
, call stream.CopyTo(ms)
and then return ms.ToArray()
. Job done.
I should perhaps explain why my answer is longer than the others. Stream.Read
doesn't guarantee that it will read everything it's asked for. If you're reading from a network stream, for example, it may read one packet's worth and then return, even if there will be more data soon. BinaryReader.Read
will keep going until the end of the stream or your specified size, but you still have to know the size to start with.
The above method will keep reading (and copying into a MemoryStream
) until it runs out of data. It then asks the MemoryStream
to return a copy of the data in an array. If you know the size to start with - or think you know the size, without being sure - you can construct the MemoryStream
to be that size to start with. Likewise you can put a check at the end, and if the length of the stream is the same size as the buffer (returned by MemoryStream.GetBuffer
) then you can just return the buffer. So the above code isn't quite optimised, but will at least be correct. It doesn't assume any responsibility for closing the stream - the caller should do that.
See this article for more info (and an alternative implementation).
You can use Convert.ToHexString
starting with .NET 5.
There's also a method for the reverse operation: Convert.FromHexString
.
For older versions of .NET you can either use:
public static string ByteArrayToString(byte[] ba)
{
StringBuilder hex = new StringBuilder(ba.Length * 2);
foreach (byte b in ba)
hex.AppendFormat("{0:x2}", b);
return hex.ToString();
}
or:
public static string ByteArrayToString(byte[] ba)
{
return BitConverter.ToString(ba).Replace("-","");
}
There are even more variants of doing it, for example here.
The reverse conversion would go like this:
public static byte[] StringToByteArray(String hex)
{
int NumberChars = hex.Length;
byte[] bytes = new byte[NumberChars / 2];
for (int i = 0; i < NumberChars; i += 2)
bytes[i / 2] = Convert.ToByte(hex.Substring(i, 2), 16);
return bytes;
}
Using Substring
is the best option in combination with Convert.ToByte
. See this answer for more information. If you need better performance, you must avoid Convert.ToByte
before you can drop SubString
.
Best Answer
This function converts byte array into Bitmap which can be use to set the
Image
Property of the picturebox.Sample usage: