Question

I’m having trouble converting the following VB6 code into c#4.0? This function takes a BLOb from an oracle database and converts it to bytes. After removing the code un-needed by this example, it looked something like this…

Function tempFunc(Data as Variant) as byte()

    tempFunc = StrConv(Data, vbUnicode)

End Function

after converting the function to c#…

byte[] tempFunc(object data) 
{ 
    ...code...
}

I tried to convert the inner line but got to a problem…

Microsoft.VisualBasic.Strings.StrConv(data, VBStrConv.???);

There isn’t a Unicode equivalent flag in the VBStrConv enum any more…
looked up a few other examples and found this…

byteData = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data); 

However this takes a string and therefore is unhelpful…
Found another example using a memory stream however to convert it, it would need metadata, which would not exist in the original BLObs from the database.

Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

You can use BinaryFormatter

private byte[] tempFunc(object obj) 
{
    if(obj == null)
        return null;
    BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
    MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
    bf.Serialize(ms, obj);
    return ms.ToArray();
}