Question

I need to serialize a color used in a WPF application to a database. I’d like to use the sRGB values, because they’re more familiar to those of us that have spent the last few years doing web development.

How can a get an ARGB string (like #FFFFFFFF) from a System.Windows.Media.Color object?

UPDATE: I was misled by the documentation on MSDN. As @Kris noted below, the documentation for the ToString() method is incorrect. Although it says that ToString() “creates a string representation of the color using the ScRGB channels”, it will actually return a string in ARGB hex format if the color was created using the FromARGB() method. It’s an undocumented feature, I suppose.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms606572.aspx

Answer 1

If you create your colors using either Color.FromRgb or Color.FromArgb instead of FromScRgb you should get a hex string result from ToString.

If you want to do it manually

string.Format("#{0:X2}{1:X2}{2:X2}{3:X2}", c.A, c.R, c.G, c.B);

You can use int.Parse(,NumberStyles.HexNumber) to go the other way.

Note sRGB and scRGB refer to different color spaces, make sure your using the one you want.