Question

If I run Convert.FromBase64String(“test”) I get the error that it’s invalid length. I’m trying to convert to a byte array so I can encrypt it, but on shorter strings it’s giving the length error. I tried rpadding with ‘=’ but no matter how many I put nothing seems to work.

What are my options with this?

Answer 1

If you have text data that you need to store as binary:

• You convert a string to byte[] via Encoding.GetBytes(), for example Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes()
• you convert such text data back to a string via Encoding.GetString(); this requires the binary to be valid text data via this encoding (not arbitrary binary)

If you have binary data you need to store as a string;

• you convert arbitrary binary to a string with Convert.ToBase64String()
• you convert such a string back to binary with Convert.FromBase64String(); this requires the string to be a valid base-64 string (not an arbitrary string)

So: look at Encoding.