How can I detach a stream from a stream reader or stream writer?

Question

I have a class which accepts a stream as input (in the constructor). It surfaces content from this stream through various methods.

However, I don't want my object to be responsible for closing the stream -- that should be the responsibility of the caller. I therefore need to close my StreamReader inside my class, but I can't close the underlying stream.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

StreamReaders are designed to take complete and sole ownership of the underlying stream.

In particular, the StreamReader will arbitrarily read ahead in the stream to fill an internal buffer. (This bit me once)

If you need to share the stream, you probably shouldn't use a StreamReader at all.