Question

I am trying to “chunk” up the bytes of an image. This will allow me to upload a large image in portions. I have the image currently stored as one large byte[]. I would like to split the byte array into byte[]‘s with a maxlength of 512 elements. However, I’m not sure how to do this in the most efficient way.

Does anyone know how I can do this in the most efficient manner?

Answer 1

The most efficient method would be: not to. If you already have the image as a single byte[] then for local code, just specifying the offset and length (perhaps som ArraySegment-of-byte) is usually sufficient. If your upload API only takes byte[], then you still shouldn’t chunk it completely; just use a single 512 buffer and use Buffer.BlockCopy to load it will successive pieces of the data. You may need to resize (Array.Resize) the final chunk, but at most 2 arrays should be needed.

Even better; avoid needing a byte[] in the first place: consider loading the data via a streaming API (this will work well if the data is coming from a file); just use Read (in a loop, processing the returned value etc) to populate chunks of max 512. For example (untested, just of illustration):

byte[] buffer = new byte[512];
while(true) {
    int space = 512, read, offset = 0;
    while(space > 0 && (read = stream.Read(buffer, offset, space)) > 0) {
        space -= read;
        offset += read;
    }
    // either a full buffer, or EOF
    if(space != 0) { // EOF - final
       if(offset != 0) { // something to send
         Array.Resize(red buffer, offset);
         Upload(buffer);
       }
       break;
    } else { // full buffer
       Upload(buffer);
    }
}