Question

I have a basic stream which is the stream of HTTP request
and

var s=new HttpListener().GetContext().Request.InputStream;

I want to read the stream (which contain non-Character content, because i’ve sent the packet)

When we wrap this stream by StreamReader then we use the ReadToEnd() function of StreamReader it can read the whole stream and return a string…

HttpListener listener = new HttpListener();
listener.Prefixes.Add("http://127.0.0.1/");
listener.Start();
var context = listener.GetContext();
var sr = new StreamReader(context.Request.InputStream);
string x=sr.ReadToEnd(); //This Workds

but since it has nonCharacter content we cant use StremReader (i tried all encoding mechanisms..using string is just wrong).And i Cant use the function

context.Request.InputStream.Read(buffer,position,Len) 

because I cant get the length of the stream, InputStream.Length always throws an exception and cant be used..and i dont want to create a small protocol like [size][file] and read first size then the file …somehow the StreamReader can get the length ..and i just want to know how .
I also tried this and it didn’t work

List<byte> bb = new List<byte>();
var ss = context.Request.InputStream;
byte b = (byte)ss.ReadByte();
while (b >= 0)
{
    bb.Add(b);
    b = (byte)ss.ReadByte();
}

I’ve solved it by the following

FileStream fs = new FileStream("C:\\cygwin\\home\\Dff.rar", FileMode.Create);
byte[] file = new byte[1024 * 1024];
int finishedBytes = ss.Read(file, 0, file.Length);
while (finishedBytes > 0)
{
    fs.Write(file, 0, finishedBytes);
    finishedBytes = ss.Read(file, 0, file.Length);
}
fs.Close();

thanks Jon , Douglas

Answer 1

Your bug lies in the following line:

byte b = (byte)ss.ReadByte();

The byte type is unsigned; when Stream.ReadByte returns -1 at the end of the stream, you’re indiscriminately casting it to byte, which converts it to 255 and, therefore, satisfies the b >= 0 condition. It is helpful to note that the return type is int, not byte, for this very reason.

A quick-and-dirty fix for your code:

List<byte> bb = new List<byte>();
var ss = context.Request.InputStream;
int next = ss.ReadByte();
while (next != -1)
{
    bb.Add((byte)next);
    next = ss.ReadByte();
}

The following solution is more efficient, since it avoids the byte-by-byte reads incurred by the ReadByte calls, and uses a dynamically-expanding byte array for Read calls instead (similar to the way that List<T> is internally implemented):

var ss = context.Request.InputStream;

byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
int totalCount = 0;

while (true)
{
    int currentCount = ss.Read(buffer, totalCount, buffer.Length - totalCount);
    if (currentCount == 0)
        break;

    totalCount += currentCount;
    if (totalCount == buffer.Length)
        Array.Resize(ref buffer, buffer.Length * 2);
}

Array.Resize(ref buffer, totalCount);