Question

This is a simple one, and one that I thought would have been answered. I did try to find an answer on here, but didn’t come up with anything – so apologies if there is something I have missed.

Anyway, is there an equivalent of StringBuilder but for byte arrays?

I’m not bothered about all the different overloads of Append() – but I’d like to see Append(byte) and Append(byte[]).

Is there anything around or is it roll-your-own time?

Answer 1

Would MemoryStream work for you? The interface might not be quite as convenient, but it offers a simple way to append bytes, and when you are done you can get the contents as a byte[] by calling ToArray().

A more StringBuilder-like interface could probably be achieved by making an extension method.

Update
Extension methods could look like this:

public static class MemoryStreamExtensions
{
    public static void Append(this MemoryStream stream, byte value)
    {
        stream.Append(new[] { value });
    }

    public static void Append(this MemoryStream stream, byte[] values)
    {
        stream.Write(values, 0, values.Length);
    }
}

Usage:

MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
stream.Append(67);
stream.Append(new byte[] { 68, 69 });
byte[] data = stream.ToArray();  // gets an array with bytes 67, 68 and 69