How does the BigInteger store values internally?

Question

The BigInteger class has a method that returns a byte array. Is that indicative of the fact that the class uses a byte array internally as well to store numbers?

Thi

Answer 1

According to the reference source it appears that it stores it's information as a uint[] for the data and a int for the sign.

namespace System.Numerics
{
    /// 
Represents an arbitrarily large signed integer.
    [Serializable]
    public struct BigInteger : IFormattable, IComparable, IComparable, IEquatable
    {

    // For values int.MinValue < n <= int.MaxValue, the value is stored in sign
    // and _bits is null. For all other values, sign is +1 or -1 and the bits are in _bits
    internal int _sign;
    internal uint[] _bits;

Here is the code it executes to perform ToByteArray()

    // Return the value of this BigInteger as a little-endian twos-complement
    // byte array, using the fewest number of bytes possible. If the value is zero,
    // return an array of one byte whose element is 0x00.
    public byte[] ToByteArray() {
        if (_bits == null && _sign == 0)
            return new byte[] { 0 };

        // We could probably make this more efficient by eliminating one of the passes.
        // The current code does one pass for uint array -> byte array conversion,
        // and then another pass to remove unneeded bytes at the top of the array.
        uint[] dwords;
        byte highByte;

        if (_bits == null) {
            dwords = new uint[] { (uint)_sign };
            highByte = (byte)((_sign < 0) ? 0xff : 0x00);
        }
        else if(_sign == -1) {
            dwords = (uint[])_bits.Clone();
            NumericsHelpers.DangerousMakeTwosComplement(dwords);  // mutates dwords
            highByte = 0xff;
        } else {
            dwords = _bits;
            highByte = 0x00;
        }

        byte[] bytes = new byte[checked(4 * dwords.Length)];
        int curByte = 0;
        uint dword;
        for (int i = 0; i < dwords.Length; i++) {
            dword = dwords[i];
            for (int j = 0; j < 4; j++) {
                bytes[curByte++] = (byte)(dword & 0xff);
                dword >>= 8;
            }
        }

        // find highest significant byte
        int msb;
        for (msb = bytes.Length - 1; msb > 0; msb--) {
            if (bytes[msb] != highByte) break;
        }
        // ensure high bit is 0 if positive, 1 if negative
        bool needExtraByte = (bytes[msb] & 0x80) != (highByte & 0x80);

        byte[] trimmedBytes = new byte[msb + 1 + (needExtraByte ? 1 : 0)];
        Array.Copy(bytes, trimmedBytes, msb + 1);

        if (needExtraByte) trimmedBytes[trimmedBytes.Length - 1] = highByte;
        return trimmedBytes;
    }