Question

Is there a way I can alter this function which converts byte arrays to a string so it doesn’t use LINQ? (to make it compatible with prior .NET versions)?

private string ByteToString(byte[] data)
{
    return String.Concat(data.Select(b => b.ToString("x2")));
}

Most methods found on the web, seem to return an unprintable unicode string. The code above above returns a safe string (eg b8b30dcfcac41ebd5313107adf7054024fb1ac69 rather than loads of high-ASCII chars) however I don’t really understand what the function above is doing (especially with regards to the “x2” parameter.

Answer 1

Sure, you can just roll it into a foreach loop if all you want to do is make the code above “non-LINQ”. String.Concat() just concatenates an IEnumerable into a string, which we can do with a StringBuilder:

private string ByteToString(byte[] data)
{
    var builder = new StringBuilder();

    for (int i=0; i<data.Length; i++)
    {
        builder.Append(data[i].ToString("x2"));
    }

    return builder.ToString();
}

Probably many ways to do this, but this would be a fairly literal translation of the LINQ code you list.