Writing a text file in memory without storing to disk

Question

I have a list of string as input, which I need to put into a text file, and then put that text file into an encrypted ZIP archive. I want to do this in two steps:

1. Create a text file and get its bytes
2. Write the bytes into the archive using a zip library

However, there is one main requirement: For security reasons I am not allowed to write the text file to disk !

I've been playing around with memory streams and stream writers etc. but can't seem to figure it out. I'd prefer UTF8 encoding.

private byte[] GenerateTextFile(List<string> contents)
{
    // Generate a text file in memory and return its bytes
}

Can you guys help me out?

Answer 1

That's an easy one, you should concat all the strings into one and then call Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes()

To concat the strings you can use:

string.Join(delimiter, contents)

If you don't need the delimeter just remove it, otherwise you probably need to use a \\n

So you would have this method:

private byte[] GenerateTextFile(List<string> contents)
{
    return Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(string.Join(delimiter, contents));
}