Reading text from IInputStream

Question

I have an IInputStream Interface (Windows.Storage.Streams) object. It has text. That is all I know. I just want to read the text. I do not see how to determine the length of the text. It is not being read asynchronously therefore the length should be available.

I can create a buffer as in:

Windows.Storage.Streams.Buffer buffer = new Windows.Storage.Streams.Buffer(200);

And read as in:

await linkstream.ReadAsync(buffer, buffer.Capacity, InputStreamOptions.None);

However I do not see how to use the buffer. I do not see how to get a byte array from the buffer or do anything to convert it to text.

I have looked at many samples. The Microsoft samples are samples of something else. They link to samples that are in a GitHub repository but the samples are huge, I just need a few lines that are relevant.

Answer 1

If thestream is the stream with text then the following will get the text. Obviously a larger capacity can be specified for the buffer.

StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
Windows.Storage.Streams.Buffer buffer = new(100);
await thestream.ReadAsync(buffer, buffer.Capacity, InputStreamOptions.None);
while (buffer.Length > 0)
{
    using (var dataReader = DataReader.FromBuffer(buffer))
    {
        dataReader.UnicodeEncoding = Windows.Storage.Streams.UnicodeEncoding.Utf8;
        sb.Append(dataReader.ReadString(buffer.Length));
        await thestream.ReadAsync(buffer, buffer.Capacity, InputStreamOptions.None);
    }
}