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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T09:59:05+00:00

I’m doing a lot of string manipulation in C#, and really need the strings

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I’m doing a lot of string manipulation in C#, and really need the strings to be stored one byte per character. This is because I need gigabytes of text simultaneously in memory and it’s causing low memory issues. I know for certain that this text will never contain non-ASCII characters, so for my purposes, the fact that System.String and System.Char store everything as two bytes per character is both unnecessary and a real problem.

I’m about to start coding my own CharAscii and StringAscii classes – the string one will basically hold its data as byte[], and expose string manipulation methods similar to the ones that System.String does. However this seems a lot of work to do something that seems like a very standard problem, so I’m really posting here to check that there isn’t already an easier solution. Is there for example some way I can make System.String internally store data as UTF8 that I haven’t noticed, or some other way round the problem?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As you’ve found, the CLR uses UTF-16 for character encoding. Your best bet may be to use the Encoding classes & a BitConverter to handle the text. This question has some good examples for converting between the two encodings:

    Convert String (UTF-16) to UTF-8 in C#

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