Get Length of Data Available in NetworkStream

Question

I would like to be able to get the length of the data available from a TCP network stream in C# to set the size of the buffer before reading from the network stream. There is a NetworkStream.Length property but it isn't implemented yet, and I don't want to allocate an enormous size for the buffer as it would take up too much space. The only way I though of doing it would be to precede the data transfer with another telling the size, but this seems a little messy. What would be the best way for me to go about doing this.

Answer 1

When accessing Streams, you usually read and write data in small chunks (e.g. a kilobyte or so), or use a method like CopyTo that does that for you.

This is an example using CopyTo to copy the contents of a stream to another stream and return it as a byte[] from a method, using an automatically-sized buffer.

using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
{
    networkStream.CopyTo(ms);
    return ms.ToArray();
}

This is code that reads data in the same way, but more manually, which might be better for you to work with, depending on what you're doing with the data:

byte[] buffer = new byte[2048]; // read in chunks of 2KB
int bytesRead;
while((bytesRead = networkStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
{
    //do something with data in buffer, up to the size indicated by bytesRead
}

(the basis for these code snippets came from Most efficient way of reading data from a stream)