Question

Assume that I have a MemoryStream and function that operates on bytes.

Current code is something like this:

void caller()
{
    MemoryStream ms = // not important
    func(ms.GetBuffer(), 0, (int)ms.Length);
}

void func(byte[] buffer, int offset, int length)
{
    // not important
}

I can not change func but I would like to minimize possibility of changing stream data from within the func.

How could / should I rewrite the code to be sure that stream data won’t be changed?

Or this can’t be done?

EDIT:

I am sorry, I didn’t mention that a I would like to not make copies of data.

Answer 1

Call .ToArray.

func(ms.GetBuffer().ToArray(), 0, (int)ms.Length);

From MSDN (emphasis mine):

Note that the buffer contains allocated bytes which might be unused.
For example, if the string “test” is written into the MemoryStream
object, the length of the buffer returned from GetBuffer is 256, not
4, with 252 bytes unused. To obtain only the data in the buffer, use
the ToArray method; however, ToArray creates a copy of the data in
memory.

---

Ideally you would change func to take an IEnumerable<byte>. Once a method has the array, you’re trusting they won’t modify the data if you don’t want them to. If the contract was to provide IEnumerable<byte>, the implementer would have to decide if they need a copy to edit or not.