Why is MemoryStream limited to 6KB of data?

Question

I have an XML document, which is 7,917 characters. It's read into an XElement using LINQ to XML, but I need to map/convert/adapt this XElement to a string (to send to a web service).

Here is my method:

    public string AdaptXElementToString(XElement xml)
    {
        Encoding encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(SpecializedEncodings.Iso88591);

        using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
        {
            XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings { Encoding = encoding };

            memoryStream.SetLength(21*1024*1024);

            using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(memoryStream, settings))
            {
                xml.WriteTo(writer);
                memoryStream.Flush();

                string xmlText = encoding.GetString(memoryStream.ToArray());
                return xmlText;
            }
        }
    }

When I call this method, I can see using Intellisense that 'xml' has the entire contents of my file. However, the string xmlText gets chopped off at the 6144th character (which is 6 KB exactly). Because the xmlText is getting chopping off, I'm losing 1773 characters.

Does anyone know why this method isn't returning the entire string? I set the length of the memory stream buffer to 21 MB to ensure that it's big enough (even though the default constructor supports resizing).

I get the same behavior if I remove the call to SetLength(). I also get the same behavior if I remove the call to Flush().

For my purposes, I must use encoding ISO-8859-1, so I can't change to UTF-8 or 16.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Solved the problem:

use writer.Flush(); not memoryStream.Flush()