Writing String to Stream and reading it back does not work

Question

I want to write a String to a Stream (a MemoryStream in this case) and read the bytes one by one.

stringAsStream = new MemoryStream();
UnicodeEncoding uniEn         


        

Answer 1

I think it would be a lot more productive to use a TextWriter, in this case a StreamWriter to write to the MemoryStream. After that, as other have said, you need to "rewind" the MemoryStream using something like stringAsStream.Position = 0L;.

stringAsStream = new MemoryStream();

// create stream writer with UTF-16 (Unicode) encoding to write to the memory stream
using(StreamWriter sWriter = new StreamWriter(stringAsStream, UnicodeEncoding.Unicode))
{
  sWriter.Write("Lorem ipsum.");
}
stringAsStream.Position = 0L; // rewind

Note that:

StreamWriter defaults to using an instance of UTF8Encoding unless specified otherwise. This instance of UTF8Encoding is constructed without a byte order mark (BOM)

Also, you don't have to create a new UnicodeEncoding() usually, since there's already one as a static member of the class for you to use in convenient utf-8, utf-16, and utf-32 flavors.

And then, finally (as others have said) you're trying to convert the bytes directly to chars, which they are not. If I had a memory stream and knew it was a string, I'd use a TextReader to get the string back from the bytes. It seems "dangerous" to me to mess around with the raw bytes.