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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T12:48:01+00:00

I’m trying to read-in a bunch of unsigned integers from a configuration file into

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I’m trying to read-in a bunch of unsigned integers from a configuration file into a class. These numbers may be specified in either base-10 (eg: 1234) or in base-16 (eg: 0xAB31). Therefore looking for the strtoul equivalent in C# 2.0.

More specifically, I’m interested in a C# function which mimics the behaviour of the this function when the argument indicating the base or radix is passed in as zero. (Under C++, strtoul will attempt to ‘guess’ the base or radix based on the first couple of characters in the string and then proceed to convert the number suitably)

Currently I’m manually checking the first two characters (using string.Substring() method) of the string and then calling Convert.ToUInt32(hex, 10) or Convert.ToUInt32(hex, 16) as needed.

I’m sure that there has to be a better way to deal with this problem and hence this post. More elegant ideas/solutions or work-arounds would be great help.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Well, you don’t need to use Substring unless it’s in hex, but it sounds like you’re basically doing it the right way:

    return text.StartsWith("0x") ? Convert.ToUInt32(text.Substring(2), 16)
                             : Convert.ToUInt32(text, 10);

    Obviously this will create an extra object for the Substring call, and you could write your own hex parsing code to cope with this – but unless you’ve actually run into performance problems with this approach, I’d keep it simple.

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