Why is the content being corrupted when writing to response stream

Question

I'm trying to write out to the response stream - but it is failing, it is corrupting the data somehow...

I want to be able to write a stream stored somewhere else to the HttpWebResponse so I can't use 'WriteFile' for this, plus I want to do this for several MIME types but it fails for all of them - mp3, pdf etc...

 public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
    {
        var httpResponse = context.Response;
        httpResponse.Clear();
        httpResponse.BufferOutput = true;
        httpResponse.StatusCode = 200;

        using (var reader = new FileStream(Path.Combine(context.Request.PhysicalApplicationPath, "Data\\test.pdf"), FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))
        {
            var buffer = new byte[reader.Length];
            reader.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);

            httpResponse.ContentType = "application/pdf";
            httpResponse.Write(Encoding.Default.GetChars(buffer, 0, buffer.Length), 0, buffer.Length);
            httpResponse.End();
        }
    }

Cheers in advance

Answer 1

Because you're writing characters, not bytes. A character is definitely not a byte; it has to be encoded, and that is where your "corruption" comes in. Do it like this instead:

using (var reader = new FileStream(Path.Combine(context.Request.PhysicalApplicationPath, "Data\\test.pdf"), FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))
{
    var buffer = new byte[reader.Length];
    reader.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);

    httpResponse.ContentType = "application/pdf";
    httpResponse.BinaryWrite(buffer);
    httpResponse.End();
}