Array slices in C#

Solution 1:

You could use ArraySegment<T>. It's very light-weight as it doesn't copy the array:

string[] a = { "one", "two", "three", "four", "five" };
var segment = new ArraySegment<string>( a, 1, 2 );

Solution 2:

Arrays are enumerable, so your foo already is an IEnumerable<byte> itself. Simply use LINQ sequence methods like Take() to get what you want out of it (don't forget to include the Linq namespace with using System.Linq;):

byte[] foo = new byte[4096];

var bar = foo.Take(41);

If you really need an array from any IEnumerable<byte> value, you could use the ToArray() method for that. That does not seem to be the case here.

Solution 3:

You could use the arrays CopyTo() method.

Or with LINQ you can use Skip() and Take()...

byte[] arr = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8};
var subset = arr.Skip(2).Take(2);

Solution 4:

Starting from C# 8.0/.Net Core 3.0

Array slicing will be supported, along with the new types Index and Range being added.

Range Struct docs
Index Struct docs

Index i1 = 3;  // number 3 from beginning
Index i2 = ^4; // number 4 from end
int[] a = { 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 };
Console.WriteLine($"{a[i1]}, {a[i2]}"); // "3, 6"

var slice = a[i1..i2]; // { 3, 4, 5 }

Above code sample taken from the C# 8.0 blog.

note that the ^ prefix indicates counting from the end of the array. As shown in the docs example

var words = new string[]
{
                // index from start    index from end
    "The",      // 0                   ^9
    "quick",    // 1                   ^8
    "brown",    // 2                   ^7
    "fox",      // 3                   ^6
    "jumped",   // 4                   ^5
    "over",     // 5                   ^4
    "the",      // 6                   ^3
    "lazy",     // 7                   ^2
    "dog"       // 8                   ^1
};              // 9 (or words.Length) ^0

Range and Index also work outside of slicing arrays, for example with loops

Range range = 1..4; 
foreach (var name in names[range])

Will loop through the entries 1 through 4

_{note that at the time of writing this answer, C# 8.0 is not yet officially released}
_{C# 8.x and .Net Core 3.x are now available in Visual Studio 2019 and onwards}

Solution 5:

static byte[] SliceMe(byte[] source, int length)
{
    byte[] destfoo = new byte[length];
    Array.Copy(source, 0, destfoo, 0, length);
    return destfoo;
}

var myslice = SliceMe(sourcearray,41);