I dislike BitConverter, because (as Marc Gravell answered) it is specced to rely on system endianness, meaning you technically have to do a system endianness check every time you use BitConverter to ensure you don't have to reverse the array. And usually, with saved files, you generally know the endianness you're trying to read, and that might not be the same. You might just be handling file formats with big-endian values, too, like, for instance, PNG chunks.
Because of that, I just wrote my own methods for this, which take a byte array, the read offset and read length as arguments, as well as a boolean to specify the endianness handling, and which uses bit shifting for efficiency:
public static UInt64 ReadIntFromByteArray(Byte[] data, Int32 startIndex, Int32 bytes, Boolean littleEndian)
{
Int32 lastByte = bytes - 1;
if (data.Length < startIndex + bytes)
throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("startIndex", "Data array is too small to read a " + bytes + "-byte value at offset " + startIndex + ".");
UInt64 value = 0;
for (Int32 index = 0; index < bytes; index++)
{
Int32 offs = startIndex + (littleEndian ? index : lastByte - index);
value |= (((UInt64)data[offs]) << (8 * index));
}
return value;
}
This code can handle any value between 1 and 8 bytes, both little-endian and big-endian. The only small usage peculiarity is that you need to both give the amount of bytes to read, and need to specifically cast the result to the type you want.
Example from some code where I used it to read the header of some proprietary image type:
Int16 imageWidth = (Int16) ReadIntFromByteArray(fileData, hdrOffset, 2, true);
Int16 imageHeight = (Int16) ReadIntFromByteArray(fileData, hdrOffset + 2, 2, true);
This will read two consecutive 16-bit integers off an array, as signed little-endian values. You can of course just make a bunch of overload functions for all possibilities, like this:
public Int16 ReadInt16FromByteArrayLe(Byte[] data, Int32 startIndex)
{
return (Int16) ReadIntFromByteArray(data, startIndex, 2, true);
}
But personally I didn't bother with that.
And, here's the same for writing bytes:
public static void WriteIntToByteArray(Byte[] data, Int32 startIndex, Int32 bytes, Boolean littleEndian, UInt64 value)
{
Int32 lastByte = bytes - 1;
if (data.Length < startIndex + bytes)
throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("startIndex", "Data array is too small to write a " + bytes + "-byte value at offset " + startIndex + ".");
for (Int32 index = 0; index < bytes; index++)
{
Int32 offs = startIndex + (littleEndian ? index : lastByte - index);
data[offs] = (Byte) (value >> (8*index) & 0xFF);
}
}
The only requirement here is that you have to cast the input arg to 64-bit unsigned integer when passing it to the function.
