Question

I need to copy a C# string into a char*. I have this code, which works, but looks clumsy. Is there a more elegant way to do this?

public unsafe static void GetReply(char* buffer) {
  string reply = "Hello, world"; // or whatever
  // clumsy code:
  var i = buffer;
  foreach (char x in reply.ToCharArray()) {
    *i = x;
    i++;
  }
  *i = '\0';
}

Note: buffer is guaranteed to point to allocated memory of known length. No problems there.

Answer 1

You could use Marshal.Copy which is cleaner and likely also faster than the loop.