I am trying to convert the following code that reads the complete string response of a HttpContent into a string, to read only a certain maximum number of characters. Existing code:
private static async Task<string> GetContentStringAsync(HttpContent content)
{
string responseContent = await content.ReadAsStringAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);
return responseContent;
}
Code that I have now:
private static async Task<string> GetContentStringAsync(HttpContent content, int ResponseContentMaxLength)
{
string responseContent;
Stream responseStream = await content.ReadAsStreamAsync().ConfigureAwait(false);
using (StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(responseStream))
{
// responseContent = Data from streamReader until ResponseContentMaxLength
}
return responseContent;
}
I am new to StreamReader and HttpContent manipulation. Is there a way to do this?
There are a variety of ways to do this. However, IMHO one of the simplest is to create a
MemoryStream
into which you've read the exact number of bytes you want, and then have theStreamReader
object read from that stream instead of the original one.For example:
The above of course assumes that
ResponseContentMaxLength
has a value small enough that it is reasonable to allocate abyte[]
large enough to temporarily store that many bytes. Since the content returned is going to be of comparable scale, this seems like a reasonable assumption.But if you don't want to maintain that extra buffer, an alternative approach would be to write a
Stream
class that reads from an underlying stream object only as many bytes as you specify, and then pass an instance of that (initialized with theResponseContentMaxLength
value) to theStreamReader
object. That's quite a lot of extra work as compared to the above though. (Though, I suppose since that's such a useful object, there might be a publicly available implementation already…I know I've written something like that at least a couple of times myself, I just don't happen to have the code handy at the moment).