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 uniEncoding = new UnicodeEncoding();
String message = "Message";

stringAsStream.Write(uniEncoding.GetBytes(message), 0, message.Length);

Console.WriteLine("This:\t\t" + (char)uniEncoding.GetBytes(message)[0]);
Console.WriteLine("Differs from:\t" + (char)stringAsStream.ReadByte());

The (undesired) result I get is:

This:         M
Differs from: ?

It looks like it's not being read correctly, as the first char of "Message" is 'M', which works when getting the bytes from the UnicodeEncoding instance but not when reading them back from the stream.

What am I doing wrong?

---

The bigger picture: I have an algorithm which will work on the bytes of a Stream, I'd like to be as general as possible and work with any Stream. I'd like to convert an ASCII-String into a MemoryStream, or maybe use another method to be able to work on the String as a Stream. The algorithm in question will work on the bytes of the Stream.

Answer 1

You're using message.Length which returns the number of characters in the string, but you should be using the nubmer of bytes to read. You should use something like:

byte[] messageBytes = uniEncoding.GetBytes(message);
stringAsStream.Write(messageBytes, 0, messageBytes.Length);

You're then reading a single byte and expecting to get a character from it just by casting to char. UnicodeEncoding will use two bytes per character.

As Justin says you're also not seeking back to the beginning of the stream.

Basically I'm afraid pretty much everything is wrong here. Please give us the bigger picture and we can help you work out what you should really be doing. Using a StreamWriter to write and then a StreamReader to read is quite possibly what you want, but we can't really tell from just the brief bit of code you've shown.

Answer 2

After you write to the MemoryStream and before you read it back, you need to Seek back to the beginning of the MemoryStream so you're not reading from the end.

UPDATE

After seeing your update, I think there's a more reliable way to build the stream:

UnicodeEncoding uniEncoding = new UnicodeEncoding();
String message = "Message";

// You might not want to use the outer using statement that I have
// I wasn't sure how long you would need the MemoryStream object    
using(MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
    using(StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(ms, uniEncoding))
    {
        sw.Write(sw);
    }

    ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);

    // Test and work with the stream here. 
    // If you need to start back at the beginning, be sure to Seek again.
}

As you can see, this code uses a StreamWriter to write the entire string (with proper encoding) out to the MemoryStream. This takes the hassle out of ensuring the entire byte array for the string is written.

Answer 3

You need to reset the stream to the beginning:

stringAsStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
Console.WriteLine("Differs from:\t" + (char)stringAsStream.ReadByte());

This can also be done by setting the Position property to 0:

stringAsStream.Position = 0

Answer 4

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.