Oct 03 2006

Bytearray to string and string to bytearray

Posted by admin under .NET

 

Right now I am in the middle of converting an ancient DOS system for a client - and it involves moving existing data (stored inside a fixed length binary file) into SQL Server - and there are no docs whatsovever when it comes to record layout.

Anyway - using a Hex Editor I managed to find out each record in the file was 763 bytes - so I whipped up this little loop:



            FileStream oStream = File.OpenRead("f:\\aa2.txt");

            byte[]bLine = new byte[768];
            while (oStream.Read(bLine, 0, 763) == 763)
            {
            }
            oStream.Close();

Fine - but now what. I need to look at the record trying to find patterns of how the fields are structured within it. Using a bytearray for that is no good - I wanted to put it into a string. And found myself looking in docs again - it's simply such a thing you never seems to remember.

So here it is:

Converting a byte array to a string



byte[]bLine = new byte[...];
//Fill with data
bLine = ...
//

System.Text.ASCIIEncoding enc = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding();
string str = enc.GetString(bLine);

Converting a string to a bytearray



string sStr = "whatever";
System.Text.ASCIIEncoding  enc=new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding();
byte []bArray = enc.GetBytes(sStr);