C# Save byte array as xml file

Question

I'm receiving a .zip file from a server.
The .zip file is sent 64Base encoded and it contains an XML file.

After I decode the data to binary using Convert.FromBase64String , can I convert the byte array to XML?

I don't want to deal with unzipping.

I tried the following code: (that resulted in Gibberish that doesn't make any sense and doesn't look like XML at all)

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
string xml = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(buffer);
doc.LoadXml(xml);

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You say you don't want to unzip, but do you actually mean that you don't want to unzip to disc? Most zip libraries either allow you to unzip a file to a byte array directly or to a stream where you could pass it a MemoryStream.

There's no getting around having to uncompress. Unless you have control over the server side, then you could change the format to an uncompressed file (like a tar file). Then you wouldn't have to uncompress.

Answer 2

You say:

I'm receiving a .zip file from a server.

And:

I don't want to deal with unzipping.

Well. You have to. If the data is in a zip archive, you need to extract it first. You can't just ignore the fact.

There are plenty of zip libraries - sharpziplib is free and easy enough to use.