current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

company blog
Stack Exchange Inbox Reputation and Badges
tour help
stack overflow careers
Sign up ×
Stack Overflow is a community of 4.7 million programmers, just like you, helping each other. Join them, it only takes a minute:
up vote -1 down vote favorite

This question already has an answer here:

I'm trying to convert a byte array to a string in binary format, but Convert.ToString() returns unexpected results. Can you please tell me what am I doing wrong? Here is the code:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        StringBuilder str = new StringBuilder();
        byte[] x = { 0xB1, 0x53, 0x63 };
        for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++)
        {
            str.Append(Convert.ToString(x[i], 2));
        }
        Console.WriteLine(str);
        Console.ReadLine();
    }
}

The output is:

1011000110100111100011

I expected the output to be:

1011_0001_0101_0011_0110_0011 (0xB15363)

And not:

1011_0001_1010_0111_1000_11

share|improve this question

marked as duplicate by Peter Duniho, Chris, Alexei Levenkov c# Nov 10 '14 at 23:11

This question has been asked before and already has an answer. If those answers do not fully address your question, please ask a new question.
    
have you googled this also SO has several examples as well stackoverflow.com/questions/11654562/… – MethodMan Nov 10 '14 at 22:58
2  
I don't completely understand the question. Did you really expect there to be underscores? If not, please don't complicate the question by providing something other than the actual literal output that you expected, and which was output instead. – Peter Duniho Nov 10 '14 at 22:59
    
No, I did not expectet the output to contain underscores, I wanted to make it easier to read – Cristi Nov 10 '14 at 23:01
    
The underscores made me assume that you were grouping by bytes (well, half bytes) so my first thought is that you were saying it was truncating the last two digits. Putting delimiters between bytes in the actual output would probably have made it more readable (and probably told you what the problem was given the answers given). – Chris Nov 10 '14 at 23:03

3 Answers 3

up vote 2 down vote accepted

If you pad with zeros you'll get the answer

public static void Main()
{        
    StringBuilder str = new StringBuilder();
    byte[] x = { 0xB1, 0x53, 0x63 };
    for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++)
    {
        str.Append(Convert.ToString(x[i], 2).PadLeft(8, '0'));
    }
    Console.WriteLine(str);
    Console.ReadLine();
}

Fiddle

share|improve this answer
up vote 2 down vote

Try

str.Append(Convert.ToString(x[i], 2).PadLeft(8, '0'));
share|improve this answer
    
Thank you! I will try this – Cristi Nov 10 '14 at 23:02
    
@Cristi As Vlad wrote, the issue is that there are no leading zeros. It is easy to see by adding an extra space between numbers. – AlexD Nov 10 '14 at 23:09
up vote 2 down vote

You actually just not get leading zeroes.

01010011 will be just 1010011.

You have to add leading zeroes by any of the possible methods (Convert.ToString doesn't seem to have needed overload). PadLeft is mentioned in other answers, adding new string('0', 8 - s.Length) will do as well (but requires a temporary).

share|improve this answer
    
@DJKRAZE: This answers the question "what am I doing wrong". – Vlad Nov 10 '14 at 23:00
    
before you edited it you just had a question not the coded results – MethodMan Nov 10 '14 at 23:03
    
I can't help think that a solution to the problem might be a bit more in keeping with the site too... Though other answers do that now anyway. – Chris Nov 10 '14 at 23:04

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.