CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#.net
woddenChair
woddenChair

Reputation:

How do I convert a byte array to a string

I have a byte array which I got back from a FileStream.Read and I would like to turn that into a string. I'm not 100% sure of the encoding - it's just a file i saved to disk - how do I do the conversion? Is there a .NET class that reads the byte order mark and can figure out the encoding for me?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1872

Answers (6)

Wolf5
Wolf5

Reputation: 17130

There is no simple way to get the encoding, but as mentioned above use 

string str = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetString(mybytearray);

if you have no clue of what the encoding is. If you are in europe the ISO-8859-1 is probably the encoding you have.

string str = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1").GetString(mybytearray);

Upvotes: 1

Jim Mischel
Jim Mischel

Reputation: 133950

If File.ReadAllText will read the file correctly, then you have a couple of options.

Instead of calling BeginRead, you could just call File.ReadAllText asynchronously:

    delegate string AsyncMethodCaller(string fname);

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        string InputFilename = "testo.txt";
        AsyncMethodCaller caller = File.ReadAllText;
        IAsyncResult rslt = caller.BeginInvoke(InputFilename, null, null);

        // do other work ...

        string fileContents = caller.EndInvoke(rslt);
    }

Or you can create a MemoryStream from the byte array, and then use a StreamReader on that.

Upvotes: 1

Jon Skeet
Jon Skeet

Reputation: 1499770

How much do you know about the file? Could it really be any encoding? If so, you'd need to use heuristics to guess the encoding. If it's going to be UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32 then 

new StreamReader(new MemoryStream(bytes), true)

will detect the encoding for you automatically. Text is pretty nasty if you really don't know the encoding though. There are plenty of cases where you really would just be guessing.

Upvotes: 1

sfossen
sfossen

Reputation: 4778

Try something like this:

buffer = Encoding.Convert( Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1"), Encoding.UTF8, buffer );
newString = Encoding.UTF8.GetString( buffer, 0, len );

Upvotes: 2

gimel
gimel

Reputation: 86344

See how-to-guess-the-encoding-of-a-file-with-no-bom-in-net.

Since strings are Unicode, you must specify an encoding on conversion. Text streams (even ReadAllText() ) have an active encoding inside, usually some sensible default.

Upvotes: 5

Chris
Chris

Reputation: 40613

System.IO.File.ReadAllText does what you want.

Upvotes: 0

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