Question

My string contains the bytes (e.g 0x27), basically what I need to do is convert that string array which contains the byte data to a byte data type, so then I can encode it in UTF8, so it displays meaningful info.

1 string array contains:

0x37, 0x32, 0x2d, 0x38, 0x33, 0x39, 0x37, 0x32,0x2d, 0x30, 0x31

I need that converted to a byte array, is that possible?

My code is:

        string strData;
        string strRaw;

        XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
        xmlDoc.InnerXml = Data;
        XmlElement xmlDocElement = xmlDoc.DocumentElement;

        strData = xmlDocElement.GetAttribute("datalabel").ToString();
        strRaw = xmlDocElement.GetAttribute("rawdata").ToString();

        string[] arrData = strData.Split(' ');
        string[] arrRaw = strRaw.Split(' ');

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

To say the ‘string contains the bytes’ could be interpreted in a few ways. You can extract a string into bytes in a number of ways. Converting a string directly into bytes based on UTF8 encoding:

var inputBytes = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(input);

There are of course similar methods for other encodings.

Ignore the above

Your comment changes the way the question reads quite a bit! If your strings are just hex (i.e. the bytes are not encoded into the string) just convert from hex to integers. Something like….

var b = Convert.ToUInt32(str.Substring(2), 16)

// For an array
var bytes = new byte[arrData.Length];
for(var i = 0; i < arrData.Length; i++) {
   bytes[i] = (byte)Convert.ToUInt32(arrData[i].Substring(2), 16);
}