Why does an encrypted byte array have a different length from its char[] representation?

Question

I was working on some encryption/decryption algorithms and I noticed that the encrypted byte[] arrays always had a length of 33, and the char[] arrays always had a length of 44. Does anyone know why this is?

(I'm using Rijndael encryption.)

Answer 1

Padding and text encoding. Most encryption algorithms have a block size, and input needs to be padded up to a multiple of that block size. Also, turning binary data into text usually involves the Base64 algorithm, which expands 3 bytes into 4 characters.