Question

I want to write the following sequence of bits in a textbox, like this:

000101100000000100000001000000010000000000100111001100010010000000110000001011100011000000110000001100000011000000100000001100110011100100101110001101110011010100100000001100000010111000110000001110000010000000110000001011100011000000110000001000000011000000101110001100000011000000110000001100000000010111010111

But every each 8 bits corresponds to a byte, so I want to store them in a byte[] array. Of course, if I read them like this:

byte[] byteBuffer = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(messageTextBox.Text);

Each 0 or 1 turns into a whole byte, which is not what I want.

Is there any straightforward solution, like some existing method, or I have to develop my own?

Answer 1

I have written the following code on the go without any compiler so please apologize syntax errors – also you have to take care of reaching the end of the text string on your own, its not included. I think the below method does what you want to do ..

private bytes[] extractBytes (string text) {

    byte[] bytes = new byte[100];
    int i = 0;
    int j = 0;
    string currentByte = "";

    while (i <= text.Length) {

         currentByte += text.Substring(i, 1);

         i++;

         if (i % 8 == 0) {

             j++;

             bytes[j] = convertToDecimal(currentByte);
             currentByte = "";
         }
    )

    return bytes;
}

If you want to save the decimal value that is represented by the binary value you have extracted from your string you can use this conversion method:

private byte convertToDecimal (string binary) {

    int i = 0;
    int byte = 0;

    while (i < s.Length) {

        if (s.Substring(s.Length - 1 - i, 1).Equals("1")) {

            sum += (byte)Math.Pow(2, i);
        }

        i++;
    }

    return sum;
}