For me there are 2 disadvantages of using the stream directly, if you can live with them, you shouldn't waste memory or disk space.
- In this stream you can not seek to a specific position, you can only read the contents as it comes in;
- Your internet connection could suddenly drop and you will get an exception while parsing and processing your file, either split the parsing and processing or make sure your processing routine can handle the case that a file is processed for a second time (after a failure halfway through the first attempt).
To work around these issues, you could copy the stream to a MemoryStream:
using (var ftpStream = ftpResponse.GetResponseStream())
{
var memoryStream = new MemoryStream()
while ((bytesRead = ftpStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
{
memoryStream.Write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
}
memoryStream.Flush();
memoryStream.Position = 0;
return memoryStream;
}
If you are working with larger files I prefer writing it to a file, this way you minimize the memory footprint of your application:
using (var ftpStream = ftpResponse.GetResponseStream())
{
var fileStream = new FileStream(Path.GetTempFileName(), FileMode.CreateNew)
while ((bytesRead = ftpStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
{
fileStream.Write(buffer, 0, bytesRead);
}
fileStream.Flush();
fileStream.Position = 0;
return fileStream;
}