Question

I am programming in C#.
I have a sbyte variable.
Say it holds -10 which in binary is 11110110.
I want to store the binary representation of this value in a byte variable.
So when I copy the sbyte (-10) to the byte the bytes value would be 245.
If I try to use Convert.ToByte(sbyte) it throws an exception which makes sense.
I really don’t want to convert from one type to the other but rather make bit-wise copy.
How can I do that?

Answer 1

Just cast:

byte b = (byte) x;

If your code is normally running in a checked context, you’ll want to make this operation unchecked:

byte b = unchecked((byte) x);

Note that -10 will become 246, not 245.