How to read all text from a byte[] file?

Question

I have a text file in the form of a byte[].

I cannot save the file anywhere.

I would like to read all lines/text from this 'file'.

Can anyone point me in the right direction on how I can read all the text from a byte[] in C#?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would create a MemoryStream and instantiate a StreamReader with that, i.e:

var stream = new StreamReader(new MemoryStream(byteArray));

Then get the text a line at a time with:

stream.readLine();

Or the full file using:

stream.readToEnd();

Answer 2

Another possible solution using Encoding:

Encoding.Default.GetString(byteArray);

It can optionally be split to get the lines:

Encoding.Default.GetString(byteArray).Split('\n');

You can also select a particular encoding like UTF-8 instead of using Default.