Question

I feel silly asking but…

Using C#/.NET I have a stream and I wrote my own extension function to read short (or byte was built in).

Is there something i can use which will create an array of X length (16 in my example) and return a byte array of that? Throw an exception otherwise? ReadByte does that and is built in. There should be something like what i am asking already in the .NET framework

Answer 1

Is there something i can use which will create an array of X length (16 in my example) and return a byte array of that?

For byte data, you can just call Stream.Read:

byte[] values = new byte[16];
int read = theStream.Read(values, 0, 16);
// Make sure you read all 16...

Or, you could use BinaryReader.ReadBytes:

byte[] values = theStream.ReadBytes(16);

If you want to handle short data, I’d make an extension method that did this for BinaryReader:

public static short[] ReadInt16Array(this BinaryReader reader, int elementsToRead)
{
     short[] results = new short[elementsToRead];
     for (int i=0;i<elementsToRead;++i)
        results[i] = reader.ReadInt16();
     return results;
}