Question

I am reading from serial port using string messaga = _serialPort.ReadLine();
When i Console.WriteLine(messaga); random characters appear on the screen which is logical because the binary data is non ASCII.
I suppose the method I am using handles data as ascii.
What i would like to do is create a string var and asign to it the binary raw data coming from the port so when I console.write this var I want to see a string with binary data like 1101101110001011010 and NOT characters. How can i manage that?

Answer 1

You mean like this?

class Utility
{
  static readonly string[] BitPatterns ;
  static Utility()
  {
    BitPatterns = new string[256] ;
    for ( int i = 0 ; i < 256 ; ++i )
    {
      char[] chars = new char[8] ;
      for ( byte j = 0 , mask = 0x80 ; mask != 0x00 ; ++j , mask >>= 1 )
      {
        chars[j] = ( 0 == (i&mask) ? '0' : '1' ) ;
      }
      BitPatterns[i] = new string( chars ) ;
    }
    return ;
  }

  const int BITS_PER_BYTE = 8 ;
  public static string ToBinaryRepresentation( byte[] bytes )
  {
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder( bytes.Length * BITS_PER_BYTE ) ;

    foreach ( byte b in bytes )
    {
      sb.Append( BitPatterns[b] ) ;
    }

    string instance = sb.ToString() ;
    return instance ;
  }

}
class Program
{
  static void Main()
  {
    byte[] foo = { 0x00 , 0x01 , 0x02 , 0x03 , } ;
    string s   = Utility.ToBinaryRepresentation( foo ) ;
    return ;
  }
}

Benchmarked this just now. The above code is approximately 12x faster than using Convert.ToString() and approximately 17x faster if the correction is added to pad with leading ‘0’s.