Byte[] to String to Byte[] -- How to do so?

Ignore the reasons why someone would want to do this.... :)

I want to be able to take some bytes, covert them to a string, then later back to th开发者_JS百科e same byte array. Same length and everything.

I've tried using the ASCIIEncoder class (works for only text files) and Unicode Encoder class (only works so far for arrays 1024*n big. I assume this is because of the equal length of each character) with no success.

Is there any easy way to do this? I assume I should probably write my own functions to do so huh?

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Use Base64 encoding. It's not space-efficient though.

string s = Convert.ToBase64String(byteArray);
byte[] decoded = Convert.FromBase64String(s);

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Base64 is great at problems like this.

string str = Convert.ToBase64String(inArray);
...
byte[] ourArray = Convert.FromBase64String(str);

Note that the resulting string will be larger (of course) than your original array.

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If you don't mind the doubling of space required to store each 8-bit byte into a 16-bit char, and you don't need the string to be composed of printable characters, you could do it the direct way:

string BytesToString(byte[] b)
{
    StringBuilder  s;    

    s = new StringBuilder(b.Length);
    for (int i = 0;  i < b.Length;  i++)
        s[i] = (char) b[i];    // Cast not really needed
    return s.ToString();
}    

byte[] StringToBytes(string s)
{
    byte[]  b;    

    b = new byte[s.Length];
    for (int i = 0;  i < b.Length;  i++)
        b[i] = (byte) s[i];
    return b;
}

You could write more elaborate code to pack two 8-bit bytes into each 16-bit Unicode char, but then you'd have to handle the special cases of odd byte array lengths (which could be done using an extra sentinel byte in the last character).

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If you know the encoding of your string (I would guess it is UTF8) then simply use the encoding class:

Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes
Encoding.UTF8.GetString

Encoding class can be found in the System.Text namespace

Y.