How to take a collection of bytes and pull typed values out of it?
- by Pat
Say I have a collection of bytes
var bytes = new byte[] {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7};
and I want to pull out a defined value from the bytes as a managed type, e.g. a ushort. What is a simple way to define what types reside at what location in the collection and pull out those values?
One (ugly) way is to use System.BitConverter and a Queue or byte[] with an index and simply iterate through, e.g.:
int index = 0;
ushort first = System.BitConverter.ToUint16(bytes, index);
index += 2; // size of a ushort
int second = System.BitConverter.ToInt32(bytes, index);
index += 4;
...
This method gets very, very tedious when you deal with a lot of these structures!
I know that there is the System.Runtime.InteropServices.StructLayoutAttribute which allows me to define the locations of types inside a struct or class, but there doesn't seem to be a way to import the collection of bytes into that struct. If I could somehow overlay the struct on the collection of bytes and pull out the values, that would be ideal. E.g.
Foo foo = (Foo)bytes; // doesn't work because I'd need to implement the implicit operator
ushort first = foo.first;
int second = foo.second;
...
[StructLayout(LayoutKind.Explicit, Size=FOO_SIZE)]
public struct Foo {
[FieldOffset(0)] public ushort first;
[FieldOffset(2)] public int second;
}
Any thoughts on how to achieve this?
