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Overview

A simple library to handle buffer reading and writing. Although this library was designed to work with Channels and is part of the same project, it does not depend on it and therefore, can be used independently.

Design

An important fact on buffers, is that they were designed to work exclusively for reading or writing, not both. So, a buffer that IsReadable == true will be IsWritable == false and the other way around. This was a design decision and applies to both WrappedByteBuffer and WritableByteBuffer.

It is possible to interchange this behaviour by creating a writable buffer from a readable one and vice-versa, by using the MakeReadOnly and MakeWritable extension methods.

Using Buffers

When using Channels, you won't usually need to manually create a buffer instance, since you can interchange Byte[] and IByteBuffer types in the middleware. Nonetheless, if required, or if not using Channels, you can use WritableByteBuffer to create a writable buffer and a WrappedByteBuffer to create a readable buffer from a Byte[] object.

When retrieving data from a buffer, we have two distinct ways of doing so: by getting a value or by reading a value.

Getting a value from the buffer does not change the current reader offset, but reading a value, advances the offset by the number of bytes read.

IByteBuffer buffer = ...;

// gets the byte at 'customOffset' without changing the buffer's offset
var b1 = buffer.GetByte( customOffset );

// reads the byte at the buffer's current offset and moves it 1 byte forward
var b2 = buffer.ReadByte();

Good to know...

  • The remaining readable bytes in the buffer are exposed by the ReadableBytes property.
  • Invoking DiscardReadBytes discards all read bytes (ReadXXX methods) and resets the offset
  • Invoking ResetOffset undoes previous readings by resetting the offset
  • Invoking ToArray returns the entire buffer no matter where the offset is
  • Except for the getting and reading methods, the buffer interface uses a fluent design