Converting string to byte[] creates zero character

Question

In this convert function

public static byte[] GetBytes(string str)
{
    byte[] bytes = new byte[str.Length * sizeof(char)];
    System.Buffer.BlockCopy(str.ToCh         


        

Answer 1

First let's look at what your code does wrong. char is 16-bit (2 byte) in .NET framework. Which means when you write sizeof(char), it returns 2. str.Length is 1, so actually your code will be byte[] bytes = new byte[2] is the same byte[2]. So when you use Buffer.BlockCopy() method, you actually copy 2 bytes from a source array to a destination array. Which means your GetBytes() method returns bytes[0] = 32 and bytes[1] = 0 if your string is " ".

Try to use Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes() instead.

When overridden in a derived class, encodes all the characters in the specified string into a sequence of bytes.

const string input = "Soner Gonul";

byte[] array = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(input);

foreach ( byte element in array )
{
     Console.WriteLine("{0} = {1}", element, (char)element);
}

Output:

83 = S
111 = o
110 = n
101 = e
114 = r
32 =
71 = G
111 = o
110 = n
117 = u
108 = l