Get length of Streamreader

Question

How can I get the length of a StreamReader, as I know nothing will be written to it anymore. I thought that maybe I could pass all the data to a MemoryStream, which has a method called Length, but I got stuck on how to append a byte[] to a MemoryStream.

private void Cmd(string command, string parameter, object stream)
        {

            StreamWriter writer = (StreamWriter)stream;
            StreamWriter input;
            StreamReader output;

            Process process = new Process();

            try
            {
                process.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
                process.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
                process.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
                process.StartInfo.RedirectStandardInput = true;
                process.StartInfo.FileName = "cmd";
                process.Start();

                input = process.StandardInput;
                output = process.StandardOutput;
                input.WriteLine(command + " " + parameter);
                input.WriteLine("exit");

                using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
                {
                    int length = 1024;
                    char[] charbuffer = new char[length];
                    byte[] bytebuffer = new byte[length];

                    while (!output.EndOfStream)
                    {
                        output.Read(charbuffer, 0, charbuffer.Length);
                        for (int i = 0; i < length; i++)
                        {
                            bytebuffer[i] = Convert.ToByte(charbuffer[i]);
                        }
                        //append bytebuffer to memory stream here
                    }

                    long size = ms.Length;

                    writer.WriteLine(size);
                    writer.Flush(); //send size of the following message

                    //send message
                }

            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                InsertLog(2, "Could not run CMD command");
                writer.WriteLine("Not valid. Ex: " + e.Message);
            }
            writer.Flush();
        }

So, how can I dinamically append a byte[] to a MemoryStream? There is any way better than this to get the length of output so I can warn the other end about the size of the message which will be sent?

Answer 1

Does this work for you?

        StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(FilePath);
        long x = sr.BaseStream.Length;

Answer 2

Stream has a Length property, but will throw an exception if the stream doesn't support seek operations. A network stream for example will throw an exception if you try to read .Length. In your code, you're processing an input stream of a process. Consider if that were user input - how would you know the length until you were completely finished reading?

If you're reading a file, you can get the length with stream.Length.

In .NET 4+, you can copy one stream to another with Stream.CopyTo, eg:

inputStream.CopyTo(outputStream);

You can also load the bytes into memory with:

byte[] data;
using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
{
    stream.CopyTo(ms);
    data = ms.ToArray();
}