Storing a string as UTF8 in C#

Question

I\'m doing a lot of string manipulation in C#, and really need the strings to be stored one byte per character. This is because I need gigabytes of text simultaneously in memory

Answer 1

As I can see your problem is that char in C# is occupying 2 bytes, instead of one.

One way to read a text file is to open it with :

    System.IO.FileStream fs = new System.IO.FileStream(file, System.IO.FileMode.Open);
    System.IO.BinaryReader br = new System.IO.BinaryReader(fs);

    byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
    int read = br.Read(buffer, 0, (int)fs.Length);

    br.Close();
    fs.Close(); 

And this way you are reading the bytes from the file. I tried it with *.txt files encoded in UTF-8 that is 2 bytes per char, and ANSI that is 1 byte per char.