Dave Donaldson

This helped me. Thanks!

Me too. Thanks!

me too :)

thx !

Phew....this was of great helpfor which I was fighting for a week !!!
Thanx a lot!!!

GREAT THX

Thanks a million.

excallent function

excallent function

Thanks, simple though elegant. You have saved me a lot of time looking for the right classes to use to do this.... cheers

That was really helpful. Thanks!

thanks this help me!!

You're my hero. I'm a bit of a newb... so it took me a few seconds to find th that UnicodeEncoding means System.Text.UnicodeEncoding

Thanks for this!

Thanx a lot !!!!!!!!! the FileWriter and Convert Classes were fooling me and now i have this so i am master of program again

If anyone is experiencing that this code only converts the first char in your string use this instead:

string test = "byte test";
byte[] toSend = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(test.ToCharArray());

Mathias: All testing I did on my code converted the whole string, not just the first character. Not sure why you experienced something different.

Me three!

I has found that the ToCharArray returned a UNICODE while I was processing ASCII text files, and within my search I found this, and with a small tweak I was good to go.

public static byte[] ConvertStringToByteArray(string stringToConvert)

{

return (new ASCIIEncoding()).GetBytes(stringToConvert);

}

Thank you for this post!!

You helped me, too! Thanks.

Great! I need this!!!
Thank you very much!

Yes this is indeed a very great post. It is a simple opperation and EXTREMLY handy then working with embedded systems as my self. The "tweak" from Wolfledge (2/25/2005 2:53 PM), makes the function evenmore handy. The orginal method is splitting a char (16-bit) into bytearrays. For every char there is two bytes. The first 8-bit and the second 8-bit. The tweak from Wolfledge returns a exact byte array of the incomming byte. (Supposing that your stringToConvert does NOT contain anything above 8-bit).
Very need .... Thanx alot

cool... thanks :-)

Thank you so much for this elegant solution! It is exactly what I was looking for. I was close to writing my own function before I found this. Thanks!

I love you!

Ben: Um... I love you, too... I guess... I mean, I'm not exactly sure how to respond... just glad I could help ;-)

its great, short and sweet =)

This was an awesome answer to a nightmare I was having. I altered it to output UTF-16 ...

Return (New System.Text.UnicodeEncoding).BigEndianUnicode.GetBytes(stringToConvert)

Thanks for posting this. You can't imagine how much time this saved me!

Excellent. Vary useful. :-)

Greetings from Sweden! Thank you!

Thanks .. This really helped me. Thanks again !!!

Wow.... Since december it seems you helped a bunch of people... If you had received 1 $ for each one you'd be rich ;) Thanks. you also helped me ! Freakin stoOpid that there is nothing like ToByteArray(); !

Anyone knows how to convert byte arrays to strings ?

To convert byte arrays to strings use System.BitConverter.ToString method

How can one covert string to byte array in C++

Thank you

Helped me too
Thanks

Helped me a lot. Thanks.

That was really helpful!
thanx a lot

Great bit of code found it on google after bit of searching.

it's so fashionable to say thanks here that I'm going to say it too!

This was exactly what I was lookin' for.

Man! It's amazing how simple thing like this can helps a great deal.
Truely thanks!!

To retrieve a string from converted byte array, use similar approach.

private string ConvertByteArrayToString(byte[] bt)
{
return (new System.Text.UnicodeEncoding()).GetString(bt);
}

Great!

Thanks a lot!

Thank you very much for the code, as this is very good

It dosn't work well all the time.

It dosn't work well all the time.

hOW DO YOU COVERT A STRING OF BYTES TO AN ARRAY OF BYTES

NICE!
Got me one problem: it only converted about 2000 chars of the string. Change the UnicodeEncoding to ASCIIEncoding, then it'll work better. Or, it worked better for me that way, that is.
/Martin

why not avoid the whole 'new' keyword, and go with something like:

C#
----
string theString = "testing";
byte[] byteArray = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(theString);
theString = Encoding.Unicode.GetString(byteArray);

there's also Encoding.ASCII.GetByte()/GetString()
and so much more.

ITs sad when Google returns a better answer to a conversion function than the same query does to the microsoft online help in the IDE. I can't believe they make a mystery out of such a simple thing to do.

Thanks again

Hey, thanks a lot :)

Thanks a million. This is fantastic !

Cheers

Very useful

Ponka

Awesome... just what I was looing for :D

You are the MAN - and probably will be for years to come - as geeks everywhere, for the next several years, google for just this thing :-)

Would you marry my daughter?

thanks, it helped me also. Also please tell me how to convert these bytes back to string

thanks...i got it....
UnicodeEncoding()).GetString( byteArray );

Me too. Kind of silly that you cannot do String.ToByteArray(). I chanced upon Encoding.GetBytes() but now I don't know which Encoding to use, ie. how do I find out what the encoding of the given string is.

Cool!!! Thanks a lot!!!

When I see your solution I erase the function that I created

private static byte[] GetBytes(string s)
{
int C = s.Length;
byte[] arr = new byte[C];
for (int i=0; i<C; i++)
arr[i] = (byte)s[i];
return arr;
}

And use

System.Text.ASCIIEncoding cod = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding();
byte[] arr = cod.GetBytes(s);

But then I see in the reflector that the code of the ASCIIEncoding is the same, and with more conditionals, so I test both solutions and the function is a lot faster than the ASCIIEncoding or UnicodeEncoding. In resume not always the code that already exists is better than your own code.

Thanks baby! That was just what I needed.

Thanks dude.. it saved my precious time on weekend :)

Super! Thanks!

Another one!

Thanks YOU are great

thanks

Anyone noticed that Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes helpfully strips all your characters to 7 bit?

So when using extended chars such as ä or ö they get misrepresented.

Anyone know how to get the full 8-bit ASCII into a byte array?

I just ran into this problem myself. If you're being kinky reading binary data as strings and want the actual bytes, you need to construct the StreamReader using System.Text.Encoding.Default, and extract the bytes using the same:

byte[] binaryBytes = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(stringOfRawBinary);

Thanks :)

Thanks to you all. Had been having issues getting a pdf file from Microsoft access and writing it out as a binary stream. Turns out Access encodes the data as Unicode. Needed to convert this to 8-bit binary. The following worked well ..

'store the raw data from Access memo field (unicode encoded binary)
Dim BlobData() As Byte = RawData
' convert to unicode string
Dim Mystring As String = Encoding.Unicode.GetString(BlobData)
' convert from unicode string to 8-bit binary data
BlobData = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes(Mystring)

you just saved me a lot of time!
Here are BASE 64 encoders for those of you who work with web forms:

string Encr(string strVal)
{ byte[] binVal = (new UnicodeEncoding()).GetBytes(strVal);
return Convert.ToBase64String(binVal);
}

string Decr (string strVal)
{ byte[] binVal = Convert.FromBase64String(strVal);
return (new UnicodeEncoding()).GetString(binVal);
}

Gracias!

Thanks!

Thank you very much, saved me a lot of time.

Sweet code, thanks

The only issue with Encoding.Default is that it attempts to interpret the first few bytes of the file as an encoding, and uses no encoding only if it doesn't recognize them.

So, be careful with arbitrary binary data.

I want conversion of Byte array to string.

any luck with a PDF file stored in a foxpro memo field?

It's coming out but not complete.....

ideas?? I've tried all of the encoding options to no avail...

Your method is too slow. For a super fast conversion try this (safe and unsafe versions provided, both faster than using the encoder.)

static private byte[] ToByteArray(string source)
{
byte[] dest = new byte[source.Length];

#if UNSAFE
//Slightly faster than safe version
//Much faster than System.Text..GetBytes()
unsafe
{
fixed(char* c = source)
{
for (int i = 0; i < dest.Length; i++)
{
dest[i] = (byte)*(c + i);
//dest[i] = (byte)source[i];
}
}
}
#else
for (int i = 0; i < dest.Length; i++)
{
dest[i] = (byte)source[i];
}
#endif

return dest;
}

great,thx!

Where where you last time i needed this??? LOL thank this is very helpfull...i cant belive i didnt think last time :( O well i have it now and you cant have it back :)-

ur sweet.. this helped me a lot

really thank you!

converting to byte array is the same to get the ascii from the string?

It's really helpful!