Home/ Questions/Q 4540516
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-21T15:05:49+00:00

I have a large byte array with mostly 0’s but some values that I

  • 0

I have a large byte array with mostly 0’s but some values that I need to process. If this was C++ or unsafe C# I would use a 32bit pointer and only if the current 32bit were not 0, I would look at the individual bytes. This enables much faster scanning through the all 0 blocks. Unfortunately this must be safe C# 🙂

I could use an uint array instead of a byte array and then manipulate the individual bytes but it makes what I’m doing much more messy than I like. I’m looking for something simpler, like the pointer example (I miss pointers sigh)

Thanks!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If the code must be safe, and you don’t want to use a larger type and “shift”, them you’ll have to iterate each byte.

    (edit) If the data is sufficiently sparse, you could use a dictionary to store the non-zero values; then finding the non-zeros is trivial (and enormous by sparse arrays become cheap).

    • 0