char* to a string in C#

Question

I'm calling a function from a native DLL which returns a char* pointer, how can I convert the returned pointer to a string ? I tried :

char* c = function();
string s = new string(c);

But it just returned a weird Chinese character, which isn't the right value for c.

Answer 1

Perhaps the native DLL is actually returning an ANSI string instead of a Unicode string. In that case, call Marshal.PtrToStringAnsi:

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
...
string s = Marshal.PtrToStringAnsi((IntPtr)c);