An efficient way to Base64 encode a byte array?

Question

I have a byte[] and I'm looking for the most efficient way to base64 encode it.

The problem is that the built in .Net method Convert.FromBase64CharArray requires a char[] as an input, and converting my byte[] to a char[] just to convert it again to a base64 encoded array seems pretty stupid.

Is there any more direct way to do it?

[[EDIT:]] I'll expaling what I want to acheive better - I have a byte[] and I need to return a new base64 encoded byte[]

Answer 1

Byte[] -> String: use system.convert.tobase64string

Convert.ToBase64String(byte[] data)

String -> Byte[]: use system.convert.frombase64string

Convert.FromBase64String(string data)

Answer 2

Base64 is a way to represent bytes in a textual form (as a string). So there is no such thing as a Base64 encoded byte[]. You'd have a base64 encoded string, which you could decode back to a byte[].

However, if you want to end up with a byte array, you could take the base64 encoded string and convert it to a byte array, like:

string base64String = Convert.ToBase64String(bytes);
byte[] stringBytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(base64String);

This, however, makes no sense because the best way to represent a byte[] as a byte[], is the byte[] itself :)