Question

I need to change a file in memory, and currently I read the file to memory into a byte[] using a filestream and a binaryreader.

I was wondering whats the best approach to change that file in memory, convert the byte[] to string, make changes and do an Encoding.GetBytes()? or Read the file first as string using File.ReadAllText() and then Encoding.GetBytes()? or any approach will work without caveats?

Any special approaches? I need to replace specific text inside files with additional chars or replacement strings, several 100,000 of files. Reliability is preferred over efficiency. Files are text like HTML, not binary files.

Answer 1

Read the files using File.ReadAllText(), modify them, then do byte[] byteData = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(your_modified_string_from_file). Use the encoding with which the files were saved. This will give you an array of byte[]. You can convert the byte[] to a stream like this:

MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
stream.Write(byteData, 0, byteData.Length);

Edit:
It looks like one of the Add methods in the API can take a byte array, so you don’t have to use a stream.