Question

I tried writing an extension method to take in a ulong and return a string that represents the provided value in hexadecimal format with no leading zeros. I wasn’t really happy with what I came up with… is there not a better way to do this using standard .NET libraries?

public static string ToHexString(this ulong ouid)
{
    string temp = BitConverter.ToString(BitConverter.GetBytes(ouid).Reverse().ToArray()).Replace("-", "");

    while (temp.Substring(0, 1) == "0")
    {
        temp = temp.Substring(1);
    }

    return "0x" + temp;
}

Answer 1

The solution is actually really simple, instead of using all kinds of quirks to format a number into hex you can dig down into the NumberFormatInfo class.

The solution to your problem is as follows…

return string.Format("0x{0:X}", temp);

Though I wouldn’t make an extension method for this use.