Saving an arbitrary array of bytes as a string

Question

I've got a bunch of data that I need serialized into a string to be stored in a KVP. I've got tons of ints, bools, and floats. I take each one, BitConverter it into a byte[] that I am Buffer.BlockCopying into a single large byte[].

I need to save this large array of bytes as a string in a KeyValuePair<string, string>. I tried using Encoding.ASCII.GetString() with the big byte[] I created, and then I tried to reload my level with the string code achieved using Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes().

m_LevelCode = Encoding.ASCII.GetString( bytes );

The array of bytes has tons of 0's, so I'm guessing that's why my m_LevelCode string is an empty string.

Is there a better approach to what I'm trying to do? I have about 650 bytes worth of integers, booleans, and floats. I need them to be saved into a string. One step further, I'd like to comma separate 5 of these into a single KVP to conserve on individual keys since every area has 5 levels.

Note that ASCII doesn't allow for arbitrary octets to be encoded within it (it's a 7-bit charset). You probably want to use base64 or similar at some point if you want this to be a proper ASCII string. I'm no C# expert (never used it, in fact), but that may be the reason for some/all of the zeroes--they are just bytes that can't encode directly in ASCII. — BJ Black
– BJ Black, Commented Sep 12, 2016 at 22:59
Thanks BJ, I'll need to do a couple more tests but at first glance that looks like that might be the problem! — MOrlando616
– MOrlando616, Commented Sep 12, 2016 at 23:29
If you decode 0 as ASCII, you'll get U+0000 in your string. The length of m_LevelCode should be the same as bytes because UTF-16 encodes any character that ASCII can provide as one code unit (char). — Tom Blodget
– Tom Blodget, Commented Sep 13, 2016 at 2:58

Alexander Petrov · Accepted Answer · 2016-09-13 00:16:54Z

2

There are many ways to convert the bytes to a string

string base64 = Convert.ToBase64String(bytes);

string hex = BitConverter.ToString(bytes);

var jss = new JavaScriptSerializer();
string json = jss.Serialize(bytes);

where bytes is byte array.

answered Sep 13, 2016 at 0:16

Alexander Petrov

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