Question

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Whats the diffrence between an array<Byte>^ and a byte*?

i am translating some c# code to c++ however translating the piece about UTF8Encoding, i get stuck that c++ returns a array^ while i need a byte* as areturn type. I spend a long time on this code trying to get around it but i keep failing. How could i change it to return a byte*?

array<Byte>^ StrToByteArray(System::String^ unicodeString)
{
    UTF8Encoding^ utf8 = gcnew UTF8Encoding;
    array<Byte>^ encodedBytes = utf8->GetBytes( unicodeString );
    return encodedBytes;
}

Answer 1

I think there is no way to do a conversion from array to X* without manually copying each element. This would look something like following snippet:

byte* StrToByteArray(System::String^ unicodeString)
{
    UTF8Encoding^ utf8 = gcnew UTF8Encoding;
    array<Byte>^ encodedBytes = utf8->GetBytes( unicodeString );
    const size_t len = encodedBytes->Length;
    byte* encodedBytesRaw = new byte[len+1];
    for( int i=0; i<len; ++i )
        encodedBytesRaw[i] = encodedBytes[i];
    encodedBytesRaw [len]=0;
    return encodedBytesRaw;
}

The caller has to delete the returned byte array, once he is finished with it.