Compressing and decompressing files with BZip2 in .NET C#

BZip2 is yet another data compression algorithm, similar to GZip and Deflate. There’s no native support for BZip2 (de)compression in .NET but there’s a NuGet package provided by icsharpcode.net.

You’ll need to import the following NuGet package to use BZip2:

You can compress a file as follows:

FileInfo fileToBeZipped = new FileInfo(@"c:\bzip2\logfile.txt");
FileInfo zipFileName = new FileInfo(string.Concat(fileToBeZipped.FullName, ".bz2"));
using (FileStream fileToBeZippedAsStream = fileToBeZipped.OpenRead())
{
	using (FileStream zipTargetAsStream = zipFileName.Create())
	{
		try
		{
			BZip2.Compress(fileToBeZippedAsStream, zipTargetAsStream, true, 4096);
		}
		catch (Exception ex)
		{
			Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
		}
	}
}

…and this is how you can decompress the resulting bz2 file again:

using (FileStream fileToDecompressAsStream = zipFileName.OpenRead())
{
	string decompressedFileName = @"c:\bzip2\decompressed.txt";
	using (FileStream decompressedStream = File.Create(decompressedFileName))
	{
		try
		{
			BZip2.Decompress(fileToDecompressAsStream, decompressedStream, true);
		}
		catch (Exception ex)
		{
			Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
		}
	}
}

Read all posts dedicated to file I/O here.