Question

Is it possible to use TextFieldParser on Byte? I am uploading a file via a Web Service using Byte and I am having some trouble figuring out if I can access this CSV directly or if I need to first write it to disk. Writing it to disk would be easy, but I am not convinced I need to do so.

TextFieldParser accepts System.IO.Stream, System.String (path to file), or System.IO.TextReader but I cannot figure out if I can get the Byte into one of those easily.

This is what I am looking at and what I would like to do (this code doesn’t work)

Public Function Import(ValidationKey As String, FileBytes() As Byte) As String

    Using MyReader As New Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.TextFieldParser(FileBytes)
        MyReader.TextFieldType = FileIO.FieldType.Delimited
        MyReader.SetDelimiters(",")
        'other code here
    End Using

    'other code here

End Function

Answer 1

You can read the byte array into a MemoryStream – TextFieldParser will accept it.

Using MemStream As New MemoryStream(FileBytes)
    Using MyReader As New Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.TextFieldParser(MemStream)
        MyReader.TextFieldType = FileIO.FieldType.Delimited
        MyReader.SetDelimiters(",")
        'other code here
    End Using
End Using