Question

So I’m receiving data over a socket using a buffer (byte[]) of size 1024, and I want to combine the reads together to form the entire packet in the event that they’re bigger than 1024 bytes. I chose a List to store the entire packet, and what I want to do is add each buffer read to it as it comes in. I’d want to do:

List.AddRange(Buffer); 

But in the event that the buffer isn’t full a bunch of empty bytes would get padded to the end. So naturally what I would want to do is add only a certain range of bytes to the List, but there is no such method. I could always create a temporary byte array of exactly the number of bytes that were received and then use AddRange() and get the result I want, but it just seems stupid to me. Not to mention it would be creating then throwing away an array on each read of data, which wouldn’t be good for performance on a scalable multiuser server.

Is there a way to do this with a List? Or is there some other data structure I can use?

Answer 1

If you’re using C# 3.5 (LINQ)

list.AddRange(buffer.Take(count));