Encoding used in cast from char to byte

Question

Take a look at the following C# code (function extracted from the BuildProtectedURLWithValidity function in http://wmsauth.org/examples):

byte[]         


        

Answer 1

Casting between byte and char is like using the ISO-8859-1 encoding (= the first 256 characters of Unicode), except it silently loses information when encoding characters beyond U+00FF.

And besides, is the char actually bigger than a byte (I'm guessing 2 bytes) and will actually omit the first byte?

Yes. A C# char = UTF-16 code unit = 2 bytes.