Question

somehow couldn’t find this with a google search, but I feel like it has to be simple…I need to convert a string to a fixed-length byte array, e.g. write “asdf” to a byte[20] array. the data is being sent over the network to a c++ app that expects a fixed-length field, and it works fine if I use a BinaryWriter and write the characters one by one, and pad it by writing ‘\0’ an appropriate number of times.

is there a more appropriate way to do this?

Answer 1

static byte[] StringToByteArray(string str, int length) 
{
    return Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(str.PadRight(length, ' '));
}