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

Question

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 the 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?

Answer 1

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

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

Answer 2

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.