Converting Stream to String and back...what are we missing?

flipuhdelphia picture flipuhdelphia · Jul 23, 2013 · Viewed 356.1k times · Source

I want to serialize objects to strings, and back.

We use protobuf-net to turn an object into a Stream and back, successfully.

However, Stream to string and back... not so successful. After going through StreamToString and StringToStream, the new Streamisn't deserialized by protobuf-net; it raises an Arithmetic Operation resulted in an Overflow exception. If we deserialize the original stream, it works.

Our methods:

public static string StreamToString(Stream stream)
{
    stream.Position = 0;
    using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream, Encoding.UTF8))
    {
        return reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
}

public static Stream StringToStream(string src)
{
    byte[] byteArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(src);
    return new MemoryStream(byteArray);
}

Our example code using these two:

MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
Serializer.Serialize<SuperExample>(stream, test);
stream.Position = 0;
string strout = StreamToString(stream);
MemoryStream result = (MemoryStream)StringToStream(strout);
var other = Serializer.Deserialize<SuperExample>(result);

Answer

Ehsan picture Ehsan · Jul 23, 2013

I have just tested this and works fine.

string test = "Testing 1-2-3";

// convert string to stream
byte[] byteArray = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(test);
MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(byteArray);

// convert stream to string
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);
string text = reader.ReadToEnd();

If stream has already been written to, you might want to seek to the beginning before first before reading out the text: stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);