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Start your free trialAaron Selonke
10,323 PointsWhy are we using the MemoryStream?
In the MSDN docs a Memory stream "Creates a stream whose backing store is memory." What does 'backing store' refer to exactly?
In the code from the video the WebClient's DownloadData method returns a byte[] array, that is then used to pass as a parameter to the MemoryStream.... Why are these communicating in byte arrays? I looked at the byte array its a long array of numbers, do those numbers represent the URI or the whole pages, www.google.com
Carling also mentions that when we were using the StreamReader/StreamWriter ealier, we were 'not using a stream directly' as opposed to in the MemoryStream we are using the stream directly...... What does that mean?
Basically wound like to know why we are using the MemoryStream specifically? Why does the MemoryStream take a byte[] array?
Here is the code that brought up the array of questions
var webClient = new WebClient();
var googleHome = webClient.DownloadData("https://www.google.com");
using (var stream = new MemoryStream(googleHome))
using (var reader = new StreamReader(stream))
{
return reader.ReadToEnd();
}
1 Answer
Steven Parker
231,122 PointsThe "backing store" is "where the data comes from".
In this case, the stream data is already in memory as a byte array. The numbers are the character codes of the text data that was gathered from the page.
Instead of using the Stream directly, we are using the StreamReader to handle the Stream. We only call the methods of the StreamReader.
A MemoryStream can be constructed in a variety of ways, but by passing a byte array it becomes associated with the data contained in that array.
Aaron Selonke
10,323 PointsAaron Selonke
10,323 PointsThat's how I remember it for now, MemoryStream can read a byte array, and StreamReader can read a Stream