.NET TextReader.Read - Detect EOF with no Peek supported

Question

I've got a class I need to read a data from. It's derived from TextReader (particularly FilterReader from http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/IFilter.aspx ). ReadToEnd() hangs when reading large files. ReadLine() doesn't work at all, so the only way to read in chunks is using .Read() function. MSDN suggests using Peek() and check if it returns -1 to detect if no more data is available. Unfortunately, FilterReader doesn't implement it, and it always returns -1. Is there any other way I can read all available content in chunks from this file?

Answer 1

If the standard methods ReadToEnd and ReadLine hang, then clearly there’s a pretty severe bug in the FilterReader implementation. Find it and fix it before using this in production code.

If for some reason you can’t fix it, write a new FilterReaderFixed class which wraps a FilterReader and implements Peek correctly (by actually reading a character and storing it in a private field, and remembering to return it when Read is called).