CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#asp.net
Mano
Mano

Reputation: 21

Converting Byte[] to string to remain the original byte format

I have large amount of data which consists of tables,font,bold,size,etc. Those data will be stored as byte[] in Database.

when i retrieve those data i need to convert byte[] into string,because i need to some find & replace from this string,after i convert this string into byte[],am losing the original data structure which means, i can't able to see any tables,font,bold etc. properly. So how can i find and replace in byte[] by converting string and also to keep remain the data in original format.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 262

Answers (4)

Luaan
Luaan

Reputation: 63742

The short answer is don't. Figure out the format of the data and see what you can do to do the manipulation. If the data is actually text, just stored as byte[], your approach would work, provided you encode the string correctly (ie. if your DB expects UTF-8, use UTF-8 encoding, if it's windows-1251, use that).

If you have a structure where a part of it is a string, what you're doing can't really work well. First, you probably want to modify just the relevant parts of the field. On MS SQL, you have handy functions for that. But even then, you should know what's actually stored there, not just assume that a string replace will magically work.

Now, a hack could be to use an explicit encoding that doesn't break the non-string data. That would be some single-byte encoding that doesn't do anything fancy. This is OK as long as you use the same encoding while reading the text data - however, if you use any variant of unicode, you're out of luck; due to features like string normalization, you can't really guarantee that what comes in comes out the same way, per-byte. It's generally a bad practice anyway.

Don't forget that it's quite possible the string you are looking for is actually somewhere outside of the text fields - even by pure chance, it can happen, and certain practices make that even more likely.

Again: figure out the data format inside that data field - then you can decide how to do what you want.

Upvotes: 1

toATwork
toATwork

Reputation: 1357

If the byte Array contains binary data and is no string, try to convert it to base64:

Convert.ToBase64String(yourByteArray);

Upvotes: 0

DennisUKSW
DennisUKSW

Reputation: 21

To make Byte[] to String

byte[] byteArray = new byte[10]; // put your byte array here
public void byteToString()
{        
    stringTemp = "";
    stringTemp = BitConverter.ToString(byteArray).Replace("-", "");
}

And your data still in byteArray.. :)

Upvotes: 0

Vignesh Kumar A
Vignesh Kumar A

Reputation: 28403

Try this

string result = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(byteArray)

Upvotes: 0

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