Question

I have a string which contains binary data (non-text data).

How do I convert this to a raw byte array?

Answer 1

A string in C# – by definition – does not contain binary data. It consists of a sequence of Unicode characters.

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If your string contains only Unicode characters in the ASCII (7-bit) character set, you can use Encoding.ASCII to convert the string to bytes:

byte[] result = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(input);

If you have a string that contains Unicode characters in the range u0000-u00ff and want to interpret these as bytes, you can cast the characters to bytes:

byte[] result = new byte[input.Length];
for (int i = 0; i < input.Length; i++)
{
    result[i] = (byte)input[i];
}