Question

I need some help with the following line in perl:

pack "NN", $b, $a;

I can’t really understand how to convert that to C#. where a & b are both int

Thanks

Answer 1

In .NET the result would not be a string, but a byte array. A string is composed of 16-bit char values, so that is not convenient for representing 8-bit data.

Use a method like this to get the “network” representation of an integer:

public static byte[] ToNetwork(int value) {
  byte[] data = BitConverter.GetBytes(value);
  if (BitConverter.IsLittleEndian) {
    Array.Reverse(data);
  }
  return data;
}

Write the byte arrays to a memory stream:

int a = 1;
int b = 42;
byte[] result;

using (MemoryStream m = new MemoryStream()) {
  m.Write(ToNetwork(a), 0, 4);
  m.Write(ToNetwork(b), 0, 4);
  result = m.ToArray();
}

Now you have an array with eight bytes; each integer in big endian format.