Question

I’m trying to get this piece of code working a little better. I suspect it’s the loop reading one byte at a time. I couldn’t find another way of doing this with gzip decompression. Implementing a StreamReader is fine, but it returns a string which I can’t pass to the decompression stream.

Is there a better way?

byte[] bufffer = null; List<byte> resourceBytes = new List<byte>(); int byteValue = 0; WebResource resource = new WebResource(); HttpWebResponse webResponse = null;  try {     HttpWebRequest webRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(resourceUri);     webRequest.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.AcceptEncoding, 'gzip,deflate');     webRequest.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.AcceptCharset, 'ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7');     webRequest.UserAgent = agent;     webRequest.Accept = 'text/html, application/xml;q=0.9, application/xhtml+xml, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, */*;q=0.1';     webRequest.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;     webRequest.Referer = resourceUri.OriginalString;     webRequest.Timeout = 5000;      webResponse = (HttpWebResponse)webRequest.GetResponse();      Stream webStream = webResponse.GetResponseStream();      if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(webResponse.ContentEncoding)) {         if (webResponse.ContentEncoding.ToLower().Contains('gzip')) {             webStream = new GZipStream(webStream, CompressionMode.Decompress);         }         else if (webResponse.ContentEncoding.ToLower().Contains('deflate')) {             webStream = new DeflateStream(webStream, CompressionMode.Decompress);         }     }      do {         byteValue = webStream.ReadByte();          if (byteValue != -1) {             resourceBytes.Add((byte)byteValue);         }      } while (byteValue != -1);       //Free up resources     webStream.Close();     webResponse.Close();      bufffer = resourceBytes.ToArray(); 

Answer 1

I’d agree with jmcd that WebClient would be far simpler, in particular WebClient.DownloadData.

re the actual question, the problem is that you are reading single bytes, when you should probably have a fixed buffer, and loop – i.e.

int bytesRead; byte[] buffer = new byte[1024]; while((bytesRead = webStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0) {   // process 'bytesRead' worth of data from 'buffer' } 

[edit to add emphasis] The important bit is that you only process ‘bytesRead’ worth of data each time; everything beyond there is garbage.