Question

How do I ASCII armor a memory stream? ASCII armoring is the process of encoding a binary data to a printable ASCII string. This is used for example in encryption.

Is there any standard way to do this, also with decoding support, in C#? Like an API? Otherwise, how can it be done?

Answer 1

You should almost always use Base64 (or hex) to represent arbitrary binary data in printable text:

byte[] binary = ...;
string text = Convert.ToBase64String(binary);

...

string text = ...;
byte[] binary = Convert.FromBaseString(text);

You can use MemoryStream.ToArray() to convert all the data in a MemoryStream into a byte array. Doing this in a streaming fashion would take slightly more work, but would be feasible – and there’s support for it in the framework using the ToBase64Transform and FromBase64Transform classes, which you can use to chain a stream with a CryptoStream. The result will be an ASCII-encoded base64 stream.