Equivalent of StringBuilder for byte arrays

Question

This is a simple one, and one that I thought would have been answered. I did try to find an answer on here, but didn't come up with anything - so apologies if there is something I have missed.

Anyway, is there an equivalent of StringBuilder but for byte arrays?

I'm not bothered about all the different overloads of Append() - but I'd like to see Append(byte) and Append(byte[]).

Is there anything around or is it roll-your-own time?

Answer 1

Probably List<byte>:

var byteList = new List<byte>();
byteList.Add(42);
byteList.AddRange(new byte[] { 1, 2, 3 });

Answer 2

Would MemoryStream work for you? The interface might not be quite as convenient, but it offers a simple way to append bytes, and when you are done you can get the contents as a byte[] by calling ToArray().

A more StringBuilder-like interface could probably be achieved by making an extension method.

Update
Extension methods could look like this:

public static class MemoryStreamExtensions
{
    public static void Append(this MemoryStream stream, byte value)
    {
        stream.Append(new[] { value });
    }

    public static void Append(this MemoryStream stream, byte[] values)
    {
        stream.Write(values, 0, values.Length);
    }
}

Usage:

MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
stream.Append(67);
stream.Append(new byte[] { 68, 69 });
byte[] data = stream.ToArray();  // gets an array with bytes 67, 68 and 69

Answer 3

List<byte> Then when you want it as an array you can call ToArray()

Answer 4

you can create an extension method to support this

Answer 5

I would say the closet match would be Buffer class http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.buffer.aspx

Buffer.BlockCopy(Array src, int srcOffset, Array dst, int dstOffset, int count);

Answer 6

The MemoryStream approach is good, but if you want to have StringBuilder-like behavior add a BinaryWriter. BinaryWriter provides all the Write overrides you could want.

MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(stream);
writer.Write((byte)67);
writer.Write(new byte[] { 68, 69 });