How to convert a BinaryReader to Stream in C#?

Question

I have to read a ".bin" file fully and pass the stream to a function. I tried it with BinaryReader which worked fine for reading values byte by byte, I want to pass the whole file as a string stream to my function. Usage of StreamReader gives garbage information, it looks like StreamReader can't read a bin file properly.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Don't pass binary data around as a string. Instead, use byte[] which is detached from any Stream you might have read it from. It's correct that StreamReader is for reading text, so you need to use BinaryReader or just the Stream.Read() method directly. If the stream you're reading from allows seeking (exposed through the CanSeek property), you can discover its Length and read all bytes from the stream in one go.

If, however, the stream is very large or doesn't support seeking, you need to be a bit more elaborate when reading by doing it in chunks until the Read() method returns 0 (which means the end of the stream has been reached).

There is no StreamReader.ReadToEnd() equivalent for reading binary data, but defining one as an extension method isn't very hard.