[c#] Best way to combine two or more byte arrays in C#

Many of the answers seem to me to be ignoring the stated requirements:

• The result should be a byte array
• It should be as efficient as possible

These two together rule out a LINQ sequence of bytes - anything with yield is going to make it impossible to get the final size without iterating through the whole sequence.

If those aren't the real requirements of course, LINQ could be a perfectly good solution (or the IList<T> implementation). However, I'll assume that Superdumbell knows what he wants.

(EDIT: I've just had another thought. There's a big semantic difference between making a copy of the arrays and reading them lazily. Consider what happens if you change the data in one of the "source" arrays after calling the Combine (or whatever) method but before using the result - with lazy evaluation, that change will be visible. With an immediate copy, it won't. Different situations will call for different behaviour - just something to be aware of.)

Here are my proposed methods - which are very similar to those contained in some of the other answers, certainly :)

public static byte[] Combine(byte[] first, byte[] second)
{
    byte[] ret = new byte[first.Length + second.Length];
    Buffer.BlockCopy(first, 0, ret, 0, first.Length);
    Buffer.BlockCopy(second, 0, ret, first.Length, second.Length);
    return ret;
}

public static byte[] Combine(byte[] first, byte[] second, byte[] third)
{
    byte[] ret = new byte[first.Length + second.Length + third.Length];
    Buffer.BlockCopy(first, 0, ret, 0, first.Length);
    Buffer.BlockCopy(second, 0, ret, first.Length, second.Length);
    Buffer.BlockCopy(third, 0, ret, first.Length + second.Length,
                     third.Length);
    return ret;
}

public static byte[] Combine(params byte[][] arrays)
{
    byte[] ret = new byte[arrays.Sum(x => x.Length)];
    int offset = 0;
    foreach (byte[] data in arrays)
    {
        Buffer.BlockCopy(data, 0, ret, offset, data.Length);
        offset += data.Length;
    }
    return ret;
}

Of course the "params" version requires creating an array of the byte arrays first, which introduces extra inefficiency.