C# how convert large HEX string to binary

Question

I have a string with 14 characters . This is a hex represantation of 7bytes. I want to convert it to binary. I tried using Convert.ToString(Convert.ToInt32(hexstring, 16), 2); For small strings this works but for 14 characters it will not work because the result is too large. How can i manage this? Keep in mind that the output of the conversion should be a binary string with a lengeth of 56 characters (we must keep the leading zeros). (e.g. conversion of (byte)0x01 should yield "00000001" rather than "1")

Answer 1

You can just convert each hexadecimal digit into four binary digits:

string binarystring = String.Join(String.Empty,
  hexstring.Select(
    c => Convert.ToString(Convert.ToInt32(c.ToString(), 16), 2).PadLeft(4, '0')
  )
);

You need a using System.Linq; a the top of the file for this to work.

Answer 2

Why not just take the simple approach and define your own mapping?

private static readonly Dictionary<char, string> hexCharacterToBinary = new Dictionary<char, string> {
    { '0', "0000" },
    { '1', "0001" },
    { '2', "0010" },
    { '3', "0011" },
    { '4', "0100" },
    { '5', "0101" },
    { '6', "0110" },
    { '7', "0111" },
    { '8', "1000" },
    { '9', "1001" },
    { 'a', "1010" },
    { 'b', "1011" },
    { 'c', "1100" },
    { 'd', "1101" },
    { 'e', "1110" },
    { 'f', "1111" }
};

public string HexStringToBinary(string hex) {
    StringBuilder result = new StringBuilder();
    foreach (char c in hex) {
        // This will crash for non-hex characters. You might want to handle that differently.
        result.Append(hexCharacterToBinary[char.ToLower(c)]);
    }
    return result.ToString();
}

Note that this will keep leading zeros. So "aa" would be converted to "10101010" while "00000aa" would be converted to "0000000000000000000010101010".

Answer 3

Convert.ToString(Convert.ToInt64(hexstring, 16), 2);

Maybe? Or

Convert.ToString(Convert.ToInt64(hexstring, 16), 2).PadLeft(56, '0');