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290

How do I convert a string to a byte[] in .NET (C#)?

Also, why should encoding be taken into consideration? Can't I simply get what bytes the string has been stored in? Why is there a dependency on character encodings?

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6  
Every string is stored as an array of bytes right? Why can't I simply have those bytes? –  Agnel Kurian Jan 23 '09 at 14:05
59  
The encoding is what maps the characters to the bytes. For example, in ASCII, the letter 'A' maps to the number 65. In a different encoding, it might not be the same. The high-level approach to strings taken in the .NET framework makes this largely irrelevant, though (except in this case). –  Lucas Jones Apr 13 '09 at 14:13
9  
To play devil's advocate: If you wanted to get the bytes of an in-memory string (as .NET uses them) and manipulate them somehow (i.e. CRC32), and NEVER EVER wanted to decode it back into the original string...it isn't straight forward why you'd care about encodings or how you choose which one to use. –  Greg Dec 1 '09 at 19:47
31  
Surprised no-one has given this link yet: joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html –  Bevan Jun 29 '10 at 2:57
6  
A char is not a byte and a byte is not a char. A char is both a key into a font table and a lexical tradition. A string is a sequence of chars. (A words, paragraphs, sentences, and titles also have their own lexical traditions that justify their own type definitions -- but I digress). Like integers, floating point numbers, and everything else, chars are encoded into bytes. There was a time when the encoding was simple one to one: ASCII. However, to accommodate all of human symbology, the 256 permutations of a byte were insufficient and encodings were devised to selectively use more bytes. –  George Aug 28 '14 at 15:43

31 Answers 31

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up vote -5 down vote

OP's question: "How do I convert a string to a byte array in .NET (C#)?" [sic]

You can use the following code:

static byte[] ConvertString (string s) {
    return new byte[0];
}

As a benefit, encoding does not matter! Oh wait, this is an ecoding... it's just trivial and highly lossy.

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protected by Paŭlo Ebermann Jun 27 '13 at 19:25

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