How do I get a consistent byte representation of strings in C without manually specifying an encoding

Question

How do I convert a string to a byte   in  NET  C   without manually specifying a specific encoding   I m going to encrypt the string  I can encrypt it without converting  but I d still like to know why encoding comes to play here   Also  why should encoding even be taken into consideration  Can t I simply get what bytes the string has been stored in  Why is there a dependency on character encodings

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C  to convert a string to a byte array  public static byte   StrToByteArray string str        System Text ASCIIEncoding  encoding new System Text ASCIIEncoding        return encoding GetBytes str          C  to convert a byte array to a string  byte    dBytes       string str  System Text ASCIIEncoding enc   new System Text ASCIIEncoding    str   enc GetString dBytes

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Here is my unsafe implementation of String to Byte   conversion   public static unsafe Byte   GetBytes String s        Int32 length   s Length   sizeof Char       Byte   bytes   new Byte length        fixed  Char  pInput   s      fixed  Byte  pBytes   bytes                Byte  source    Byte  pInput          Byte  destination   pBytes           if  length  gt   16                        do                                  Int64  destination       Int64  source                      Int64   destination   8        Int64   source   8                     source    16                  destination    16                            while   length -  16   gt   16                      if  length  gt  0                        if   length  amp  8     0                                   Int64  destination       Int64  source                    source    8                  destination    8                             if   length  amp  4     0                                   Int32  destination       Int32  source                    source    4                  destination    4                             if   length  amp  2     0                                   Int16  destination       Int16  source                    source    2                  destination    2                             if   length  amp  1     0                                  source                    destination                   destination 0    source 0                                      return bytes      It s way faster than the accepted anwser s one  even if not as elegant as it is  Here are my Stopwatch benchmarks over 10000000 iterations    Second String  Length 20  Buffer BlockCopy  746ms Unsafe  557ms   Second String  Length 50  Buffer BlockCopy  861ms Unsafe  753ms   Third String  Length 100  Buffer BlockCopy  1250ms Unsafe  1063ms   In order to use it  you have to tick  Allow Unsafe Code  in your project build properties  As per  NET Framework 3 5  this method can also be used as String extension   public static unsafe class StringExtensions       public static Byte   ToByteArray this String s                   Method Code

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You need to take the encoding into account  because 1 character could be represented by 1 or more bytes  up to about 6   and different encodings will treat these bytes differently   Joel has a posting on this      The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely  Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets  No Excuses

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Fastest way  public static byte   GetBytes string text        return System Text ASCIIEncoding UTF8 GetBytes text       EDIT as Makotosan commented this is now the best way   Encoding UTF8 GetBytes text

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Here is the code      Input string  const string input    Dot Net Perls       Invoke GetBytes method         You can store this array as a field  byte   array   Encoding ASCII GetBytes input       Loop through contents of the array  foreach  byte element in array        Console WriteLine   0     1    element   char element

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bytes   buffer   UnicodeEncoding UTF8 GetBytes string something     for converting to UTF then get its bytes  bytes   buffer   ASCIIEncoding ASCII GetBytes string something     for converting to ascii then get its bytes

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Try this  a lot less code   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  TEST String

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Use       string text    string       byte   array   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes text     The result is    0    115  1    116  2    114  3    105  4    110  5    103

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The key issue is that a glyph in a string takes 32 bits  16 bits for a character code  but a byte only has 8 bits to spare   A one-to-one mapping doesn t exist unless you restrict yourself to strings that only contain ASCII characters   System Text Encoding has lots of ways to map a string to byte    you need to pick one that avoids loss of information and that is easy to use by your client when she needs to map the byte   back to a string   Utf8 is a popular encoding  it is compact and not lossy

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byte   strToByteArray string str        System Text ASCIIEncoding enc   new System Text ASCIIEncoding        return enc GetBytes str

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The key issue is that a glyph in a string takes 32 bits  16 bits for a character code  but a byte only has 8 bits to spare   A one-to-one mapping doesn t exist unless you restrict yourself to strings that only contain ASCII characters   System Text Encoding has lots of ways to map a string to byte    you need to pick one that avoids loss of information and that is easy to use by your client when she needs to map the byte   back to a string   Utf8 is a popular encoding  it is compact and not lossy

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The first part of your question  how to get the bytes  was already answered by others  look in the System Text Encoding namespace   I will address your follow-up question  why do you need to pick an encoding   Why can t you get that from the string class itself   The answer is in two parts   First of all  the bytes used internally by the string class don t matter  and whenever you assume they do you re likely introducing a bug     If your program is entirely within the  Net world then you don t need to worry about getting byte arrays for strings at all  even if you re sending data across a network  Instead  use  Net Serialization to worry about transmitting the data   You don t worry about the actual bytes any more  the Serialization formatter does it for you   On the other hand  what if you are sending these bytes somewhere that you can t guarantee will pull in data from a  Net serialized stream  In this case you definitely do need to worry about encoding  because obviously this external system cares  So again  the internal bytes used by the string don t matter  you need to pick an encoding so you can be explicit about this encoding on the receiving end  even if it s the same encoding used internally by  Net     I understand that in this case you might prefer to use the actual bytes stored by the string variable in memory where possible  with the idea that it might save some work creating your byte stream  However  I put it to you it s just not important compared to making sure that your output is understood at the other end  and to guarantee that you must be explicit with your encoding  Additionally  if you really want to match your internal bytes  you can already just choose the Unicode encoding  and get that performance savings   Which brings me to the second part    picking the Unicode encoding is telling  Net to use the underlying bytes  You do need to pick this encoding  because when some new-fangled Unicode-Plus comes out the  Net runtime needs to be free to use this newer  better encoding model without breaking your program  But  for the moment  and forseeable future   just choosing the Unicode encoding gives you what you want   It s also important to understand your string has to be re-written to wire  and that involves at least some translation of the bit-pattern even when you use a matching encoding  The computer needs to account for things like Big vs Little Endian  network byte order  packetization  session information  etc

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Well  I ve read all answers and they were about using encoding or one about serialization that drops unpaired surrogates   It s bad when the string  for example  comes from SQL Server where it was built from a byte array storing  for example  a password hash  If we drop anything from it  it ll store an invalid hash  and if we want to store it in XML  we want to leave it intact  because the XML writer drops an exception on any unpaired surrogate it finds    So I use Base64 encoding of byte arrays in such cases  but hey  on the Internet there is only one solution to this in C   and it has bug in it and is only one way  so I ve fixed the bug and written back procedure  Here you are  future googlers   public static byte   StringToBytes string str        byte   data   new byte str Length   2       for  int i   0  i  lt  str Length    i                char ch   str i           data i   2     byte  ch  amp  0xFF           data i   2   1     byte   ch  amp  0xFF00   gt  gt  8              return data     public static string StringFromBytes byte   arr        char   ch   new char arr Length   2       for  int i   0  i  lt  ch Length    i                ch i     char   int arr i   2       int arr i   2   1    lt  lt  8              return new String ch

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You need to take the encoding into account  because 1 character could be represented by 1 or more bytes  up to about 6   and different encodings will treat these bytes differently   Joel has a posting on this      The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely  Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets  No Excuses

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You can use following code to convert a string to a byte array in  NET  string s unicode    abc  abc   byte   utf8Bytes   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes s unicode

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The string can be converted to byte array in few different ways  due to the following fact   NET supports Unicode  and Unicode standardizes several difference encodings called UTFs  They have different lengths of byte representation but are equivalent in that sense that when a string is encoded  it can be coded back to the string  but if the string is encoded with one UTF and decoded in the assumption of different UTF if can be screwed up   Also   NET supports non-Unicode encodings  but they are not valid in general case  will be valid only if a limited sub-set of Unicode code point is used in an actual string  such as ASCII   Internally   NET supports UTF-16  but for stream representation  UTF-8 is usually used  It is also a standard-de-facto for Internet   Not surprisingly  serialization of string into an array of byte and deserialization is supported by the class System Text Encoding  which is an abstract class  its derived classes support concrete encodings  ASCIIEncoding and four UTFs  System Text UnicodeEncoding supports UTF-16   Ref this link   For serialization to an array of bytes using System Text Encoding GetBytes  For the inverse operation use System Text Encoding GetChars  This function returns an array of characters  so to get a string  use a string constructor System String char     Ref this page   Example   string myString         some string  System Text Encoding encoding   System Text Encoding UTF8    or some other  but prefer some UTF is Unicode is used byte   bytes   encoding GetBytes myString      next lines are written in response to a follow-up questions   myString   new string encoding GetChars bytes    byte   bytes   encoding GetBytes myString   myString   new string encoding GetChars bytes    byte   bytes   encoding GetBytes myString      how many times shall I repeat it to show there is a round-trip   -

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If you really want a copy of the underlying bytes of a string  you can use a function like the one that follows  However  you shouldn t please read on to find out why   DllImport           quot msvcrt dll quot           EntryPoint    quot memcpy quot           CallingConvention   CallingConvention Cdecl          SetLastError   false   private static extern unsafe void  UnsafeMemoryCopy      void  destination      void  source      uint count    public static byte   GetUnderlyingBytes string source        var length   source Length   sizeof char       var result   new byte length       unsafe               fixed  char  firstSourceChar   source          fixed  byte  firstDestination   result                        var firstSource    byte  firstSourceChar              UnsafeMemoryCopy                  firstDestination                  firstSource                   uint length                        return result     This function will get you a copy of the bytes underlying your string  pretty quickly  You ll get those bytes in whatever way they are encoding on your system  This encoding is almost certainly UTF-16LE but that is an implementation detail you shouldn t have to care about  It would be safer  simpler and more reliable to just call  System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes    In all likelihood this will give the same result  is easier to type  and the bytes will round-trip  as well as a byte representation in Unicode can  with a call to System Text Encoding Unicode GetString

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Here is the code      Input string  const string input    Dot Net Perls       Invoke GetBytes method         You can store this array as a field  byte   array   Encoding ASCII GetBytes input       Loop through contents of the array  foreach  byte element in array        Console WriteLine   0     1    element   char element

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bytes   buffer   UnicodeEncoding UTF8 GetBytes string something     for converting to UTF then get its bytes  bytes   buffer   ASCIIEncoding ASCII GetBytes string something     for converting to ascii then get its bytes

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How do I convert a string to a byte   in  NET  C   without manually specifying a specific encoding    A string in  NET represents text as a sequence of UTF-16 code units  so the bytes are encoded in memory in UTF-16 already     Mehrdad s Answer  You can use Mehrdad s answer  but it does actually use an encoding because chars are UTF-16   It calls ToCharArray which looking at the source creates a char   and copies the memory to it directly   Then it copies the data to a byte array that is also allocated   So under the hood it is copying the underlying bytes twice and allocating a char array that is not used after the call   Tom Blodget s Answer  Tom Blodget s answer is 20-30  faster than Mehrdad since it skips the intermediate step of allocating a char array and copying the bytes to it  but it requires you compile with the  unsafe option   If you absolutely do not want to use encoding  I think this is the way to go   If you put your encryption login inside the fixed block  you don t even need to allocate a separate byte array and copy the bytes to it      Also  why should encoding be taken into consideration  Can t I simply get what bytes the string has been stored in  Why is there a dependency on character encodings    Because that is the proper way to do it   string is an abstraction   Using an encoding could give you trouble if you have  strings  with invalid characters  but that shouldn t happen   If you are getting data into your string with invalid characters you are doing it wrong   You should probably be using a byte array or a Base64 encoding to start with   If you use System Text Encoding Unicode  your code will be more resilient   You don t have to worry about the endianness of the system your code will be running on   You don t need to worry if the next version of the CLR will use a different internal character encoding   I think the question isn t why you want to worry about the encoding  but why you want to ignore it and use something else   Encoding is meant to represent the abstraction of a string in a sequence of bytes   System Text Encoding Unicode will give you a little endian byte order encoding and will perform the same on every system  now and in the future

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How do I convert a string to a byte   in  NET  C   without manually specifying a specific encoding    A string in  NET represents text as a sequence of UTF-16 code units  so the bytes are encoded in memory in UTF-16 already     Mehrdad s Answer  You can use Mehrdad s answer  but it does actually use an encoding because chars are UTF-16   It calls ToCharArray which looking at the source creates a char   and copies the memory to it directly   Then it copies the data to a byte array that is also allocated   So under the hood it is copying the underlying bytes twice and allocating a char array that is not used after the call   Tom Blodget s Answer  Tom Blodget s answer is 20-30  faster than Mehrdad since it skips the intermediate step of allocating a char array and copying the bytes to it  but it requires you compile with the  unsafe option   If you absolutely do not want to use encoding  I think this is the way to go   If you put your encryption login inside the fixed block  you don t even need to allocate a separate byte array and copy the bytes to it      Also  why should encoding be taken into consideration  Can t I simply get what bytes the string has been stored in  Why is there a dependency on character encodings    Because that is the proper way to do it   string is an abstraction   Using an encoding could give you trouble if you have  strings  with invalid characters  but that shouldn t happen   If you are getting data into your string with invalid characters you are doing it wrong   You should probably be using a byte array or a Base64 encoding to start with   If you use System Text Encoding Unicode  your code will be more resilient   You don t have to worry about the endianness of the system your code will be running on   You don t need to worry if the next version of the CLR will use a different internal character encoding   I think the question isn t why you want to worry about the encoding  but why you want to ignore it and use something else   Encoding is meant to represent the abstraction of a string in a sequence of bytes   System Text Encoding Unicode will give you a little endian byte order encoding and will perform the same on every system  now and in the future

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byte   strToByteArray string str        System Text ASCIIEncoding enc   new System Text ASCIIEncoding        return enc GetBytes str

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The closest approach to the OP s question is Tom Blodget s  which actually goes into the object and extracts the bytes   I say closest because it depends on implementation of the String Object    Can t I simply get what bytes the string has been stored in     Sure  but that s where the fundamental error in the question arises   The String is an object which could have an interesting data structure   We already know it does  because it allows unpaired surrogates to be stored   It might store the length   It might keep a pointer to each of the  paired  surrogates allowing quick counting   Etc   All of these extra bytes are not part of the character data   What you want is each character s bytes in an array   And that is where  encoding  comes in   By default you will get UTF-16LE   If you don t care about the bytes themselves except for the round trip then you can choose any encoding including the  default   and convert it back later  assuming the same parameters such as what the default encoding was  code points  bug fixes  things allowed such as unpaired surrogates  etc   But why leave the  encoding  up to magic   Why not specify the encoding so that you know what bytes you are gonna get    Why is there a dependency on character encodings     Encoding  in this context  simply means the bytes that represent your string   Not the bytes of the string object   You wanted the bytes the string has been stored in -- this is where the question was asked naively   You wanted the bytes of string in a contiguous array that represent the string  and not all of the other binary data that a string object may contain   Which means how a string is stored is irrelevant   You want a string  Encoded  into bytes in a byte array   I like Tom Bloget s answer because he took you towards the  bytes of the string object  direction   It s implementation dependent though  and because he s peeking at internals it might be difficult to reconstitute a copy of the string   Mehrdad s response is wrong because it is misleading at the conceptual level   You still have a list of bytes  encoded   His particular solution allows for unpaired surrogates to be preserved -- this is implementation dependent   His particular solution would not produce the string s bytes accurately if GetBytes returned the string in UTF-8 by default     I ve changed my mind about this  Mehrdad s solution  -- this isn t getting the bytes of the string  rather it is getting the bytes of the character array that was created from the string   Regardless of encoding  the char datatype in c  is a fixed size   This allows a consistent length byte array to be produced  and it allows the character array to be reproduced based on the size of the byte array   So if the encoding were UTF-8  but each char was 6 bytes to accommodate the largest utf8 value  it would still work   So indeed -- encoding of the character does not matter   But a conversion was used -- each character was placed into a fixed size box  c  s character type    However what that representation is does not matter  which is technically the answer to the OP   So -- if you are going to convert anyway     Why not  encode

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Upon being asked what you intend to do with the bytes  you responded      I m going to encrypt it  I can encrypt it without converting but I d still like to know why encoding comes to play here  Just give me the bytes is what I say    Regardless of whether you intend to send this encrypted data over the network  load it back into memory later  or steam it to another process  you are clearly intending to decrypt it at some point  In that case  the answer is that you re defining a communication protocol  A communication protocol should not be defined in terms of implementation details of your programming language and its associated runtime  There are several reasons for this    You may need to communicate with a process implemented in a different language or runtime   This might include a server running on another machine or sending the string to a JavaScript browser client  for example   The program may be re-implemented in a different language or runtime in the future  The  NET implementation might change the internal representation of strings  You may think this sounds farfetched  but this actually happened in Java 9 to reduce memory usage  There s no reason  NET couldn t follow suit  Skeet suggests that UTF-16 probably isn t optimal today give the rise of the emoji and other blocks of Unicode needing more than 2 bytes to represent as well  increasing the likelihood that the internal representation could change in the future    For communicating  either with a completely disparate process or with the same program in the future   you need to define your protocol strictly to minimize the difficulty of working with it or accidentally creating bugs  Depending on  NET s internal representation is not a strict  clear  or even guaranteed to be consistent definition  A standard encoding is a strict definition that will not fail you in the future   In other words  you can t satisfy your requirement for consistency without specifying an encoding   You may certainly choose to use UTF-16 directly if you find that your process performs significantly better since  NET uses it internally or for any other reason  but you need to choose that encoding explicitly and perform those conversions explicitly in your code rather than depending on  NET s internal implementation   So choose an encoding and use it   using System Text           Encoding Unicode GetBytes  abc      UTF-16 little endian Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  abc     As you can see  it s also actually less code to just use the built in encoding objects than to implement your own reader writer methods

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If you are using  NET Core or System Memory for  NET Framework  there is a very efficient marshaling mechanism available via Span lt T gt  and Memory lt T gt  that can effectively reinterpret string memory as a span of bytes  Once you have a span of bytes you are free to marshal back to another type  or copy the span to an array for serialization  To summarize what others have said   Storing a representation of this kind of serialization is sensitive to system endianness  compiler optimizations  and changes to the internal representation of strings in the executing  NET Runtime   Avoid long-term storage Avoid deserializing or interpreting the string in other environments  This includes other machines  processor architectures   NET runtimes  containers  etc  This includes comparisons  formatting  encryption  string manipulation  localization  character transforms  etc    Avoid making assumptions about the character encoding  The default encoding tends to be UTF-16LE in practice  but the compiler   runtime can choose any internal representation      Implementation public static class MarshalExtensions      public static ReadOnlySpan lt byte gt  AsBytes this string value    gt  MemoryMarshal AsBytes value AsSpan        public static string AsString this ReadOnlySpan lt byte gt  value    gt  new string MemoryMarshal Cast lt byte  char gt  value       Example static void Main string   args        string str1    quot       quot       ReadOnlySpan lt byte gt  span   str1 AsBytes        string str2   span AsString         byte   bytes   span ToArray         Debug Assert bytes Length  gt  0       Debug Assert str1    str2      Furthur Insight In C   this is roughly equivalent to reinterpret cast  and C this is roughly equivalent to a cast to the system s word type  char   In recent versions of the  NET Core Runtime  CoreCLR   operations on spans effectively invoke compiler intrinsics and various optimizations that can sometimes eliminate bounds checking  leading to exceptional performance while preserving memory safety  assuming that your memory was allocated by the CLR and the spans are not derived from pointers from an unmanaged memory allocator  Caveats This uses a mechanism supported by the CLR that returns ReadOnlySpan lt char gt  from a string  Additionally  this span does not necessarily encompass the complete internal string layout  ReadOnlySpan lt T gt  implies that you must create a copy if you need to perform mutation  as strings are immutable

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Contrary to the answers here  you DON T need to worry about encoding if the bytes don t need to be interpreted  Like you mentioned  your goal is  simply  to  quot get what bytes the string has been stored in quot    And  of course  to be able to re-construct the string from the bytes   For those goals  I honestly do not understand why people keep telling you that you need the encodings  You certainly do NOT need to worry about encodings for this  Just do this instead  static byte   GetBytes string str        byte   bytes   new byte str Length   sizeof char        System Buffer BlockCopy str ToCharArray    0  bytes  0  bytes Length       return bytes        Do NOT use on arbitrary bytes  only use on GetBytes s output on the SAME system static string GetString byte   bytes        char   chars   new char bytes Length   sizeof char        System Buffer BlockCopy bytes  0  chars  0  bytes Length       return new string chars      As long as your program  or other programs  don t try to interpret the bytes somehow  which you obviously didn t mention you intend to do  then there is nothing wrong with this approach  Worrying about encodings just makes your life more complicated for no real reason  Additional benefit to this approach  It doesn t matter if the string contains invalid characters  because you can still get the data and reconstruct the original string anyway  It will be encoded and decoded just the same  because you are just looking at the bytes  If you used a specific encoding  though  it would ve given you trouble with encoding decoding invalid characters

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I have written a Visual Basic extension similar to the accepted answer  but directly using  NET memory and Marshalling for conversion  and it supports character ranges unsupported in other methods  like UnicodeEncoding UTF8 GetString or UnicodeEncoding UTF32 GetString or even MemoryStream and BinaryFormatter  invalid characters like    amp  ChrW 55906   amp  ChrW 55655        lt Extension gt    Public Function ToBytesMarshal ByRef str As String  As Byte       Dim gch As GCHandle   GCHandle Alloc str  GCHandleType Pinned      Dim handle As IntPtr   gch AddrOfPinnedObject     ToBytesMarshal   New Byte str Length   2 - 1         Try         For i As Integer   0 To ToBytesMarshal Length - 1             ToBytesMarshal SetValue Marshal ReadByte IntPtr Add handle  i    i          Next     Finally         gch Free       End Try End Function   lt Extension gt    Public Function ToStringMarshal ByRef arr As Byte    As String     Dim gch As GCHandle   GCHandle Alloc arr  GCHandleType Pinned      Try         ToStringMarshal   Marshal PtrToStringAuto gch AddrOfPinnedObject      Finally         gch Free       End Try End Function

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Well  I ve read all answers and they were about using encoding or one about serialization that drops unpaired surrogates   It s bad when the string  for example  comes from SQL Server where it was built from a byte array storing  for example  a password hash  If we drop anything from it  it ll store an invalid hash  and if we want to store it in XML  we want to leave it intact  because the XML writer drops an exception on any unpaired surrogate it finds    So I use Base64 encoding of byte arrays in such cases  but hey  on the Internet there is only one solution to this in C   and it has bug in it and is only one way  so I ve fixed the bug and written back procedure  Here you are  future googlers   public static byte   StringToBytes string str        byte   data   new byte str Length   2       for  int i   0  i  lt  str Length    i                char ch   str i           data i   2     byte  ch  amp  0xFF           data i   2   1     byte   ch  amp  0xFF00   gt  gt  8              return data     public static string StringFromBytes byte   arr        char   ch   new char arr Length   2       for  int i   0  i  lt  ch Length    i                ch i     char   int arr i   2       int arr i   2   1    lt  lt  8              return new String ch

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Try this  a lot less code   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  TEST String

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If you really want a copy of the underlying bytes of a string  you can use a function like the one that follows  However  you shouldn t please read on to find out why   DllImport           quot msvcrt dll quot           EntryPoint    quot memcpy quot           CallingConvention   CallingConvention Cdecl          SetLastError   false   private static extern unsafe void  UnsafeMemoryCopy      void  destination      void  source      uint count    public static byte   GetUnderlyingBytes string source        var length   source Length   sizeof char       var result   new byte length       unsafe               fixed  char  firstSourceChar   source          fixed  byte  firstDestination   result                        var firstSource    byte  firstSourceChar              UnsafeMemoryCopy                  firstDestination                  firstSource                   uint length                        return result     This function will get you a copy of the bytes underlying your string  pretty quickly  You ll get those bytes in whatever way they are encoding on your system  This encoding is almost certainly UTF-16LE but that is an implementation detail you shouldn t have to care about  It would be safer  simpler and more reliable to just call  System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes    In all likelihood this will give the same result  is easier to type  and the bytes will round-trip  as well as a byte representation in Unicode can  with a call to System Text Encoding Unicode GetString

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Two ways   public static byte   StrToByteArray this string s        List lt byte gt  value   new List lt byte gt         foreach  char c in s ToCharArray            value Add c ToByte         return value ToArray        And   public static byte   StrToByteArray this string s        s   s Replace      string Empty       byte   buffer   new byte s Length   2       for  int i   0  i  lt  s Length  i    2          buffer i   2     byte Convert ToByte s Substring i  2   16       return buffer      I tend to use the bottom one more often than the top  haven t benchmarked them for speed

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The key issue is that a glyph in a string takes 32 bits  16 bits for a character code  but a byte only has 8 bits to spare   A one-to-one mapping doesn t exist unless you restrict yourself to strings that only contain ASCII characters   System Text Encoding has lots of ways to map a string to byte    you need to pick one that avoids loss of information and that is easy to use by your client when she needs to map the byte   back to a string   Utf8 is a popular encoding  it is compact and not lossy

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Two ways   public static byte   StrToByteArray this string s        List lt byte gt  value   new List lt byte gt         foreach  char c in s ToCharArray            value Add c ToByte         return value ToArray        And   public static byte   StrToByteArray this string s        s   s Replace      string Empty       byte   buffer   new byte s Length   2       for  int i   0  i  lt  s Length  i    2          buffer i   2     byte Convert ToByte s Substring i  2   16       return buffer      I tend to use the bottom one more often than the top  haven t benchmarked them for speed

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Here is my unsafe implementation of String to Byte   conversion   public static unsafe Byte   GetBytes String s        Int32 length   s Length   sizeof Char       Byte   bytes   new Byte length        fixed  Char  pInput   s      fixed  Byte  pBytes   bytes                Byte  source    Byte  pInput          Byte  destination   pBytes           if  length  gt   16                        do                                  Int64  destination       Int64  source                      Int64   destination   8        Int64   source   8                     source    16                  destination    16                            while   length -  16   gt   16                      if  length  gt  0                        if   length  amp  8     0                                   Int64  destination       Int64  source                    source    8                  destination    8                             if   length  amp  4     0                                   Int32  destination       Int32  source                    source    4                  destination    4                             if   length  amp  2     0                                   Int16  destination       Int16  source                    source    2                  destination    2                             if   length  amp  1     0                                  source                    destination                   destination 0    source 0                                      return bytes      It s way faster than the accepted anwser s one  even if not as elegant as it is  Here are my Stopwatch benchmarks over 10000000 iterations    Second String  Length 20  Buffer BlockCopy  746ms Unsafe  557ms   Second String  Length 50  Buffer BlockCopy  861ms Unsafe  753ms   Third String  Length 100  Buffer BlockCopy  1250ms Unsafe  1063ms   In order to use it  you have to tick  Allow Unsafe Code  in your project build properties  As per  NET Framework 3 5  this method can also be used as String extension   public static unsafe class StringExtensions       public static Byte   ToByteArray this String s                   Method Code

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You can use following code to convert a string to a byte array in  NET  string s unicode    abc  abc   byte   utf8Bytes   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes s unicode

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Just to demonstrate that Mehrdrad s sound answer works  his approach can even persist the unpaired surrogate characters of which many had leveled against my answer  but of which everyone are equally guilty of  e g  System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes  those encoding methods can t persist the high surrogate characters d800 for example  and those just merely replace high surrogate characters with value fffd      using System   class Program            static void Main string   args                string t                             string s    Test ud800Test             byte   dumpToBytes   GetBytes s           string getItBack   GetString dumpToBytes            foreach  char item in getItBack                        Console WriteLine   0   1    item    ushort item  ToString  x                              static byte   GetBytes string str                byte   bytes   new byte str Length   sizeof char            System Buffer BlockCopy str ToCharArray    0  bytes  0  bytes Length           return bytes             static string GetString byte   bytes                char   chars   new char bytes Length   sizeof char            System Buffer BlockCopy bytes  0  chars  0  bytes Length           return new string chars                     Output   T 54 e 65 s 73 t 74   d800 T 54 e 65 s 73 t 74   Try that with System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes or System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes  they will merely replace high surrogate characters with value fffd  Every time there s a movement in this question  I m still thinking of a serializer be it from Microsoft or from 3rd party component  that can persist strings even it contains unpaired surrogate characters  I google this every now and then  serialization unpaired surrogate character  NET  This doesn t make me lose any sleep  but it s kind of annoying when every  now and then there s somebody commenting on my answer that it s flawed  yet their answers are equally flawed when it comes to unpaired surrogate characters   Darn  Microsoft should have just used System Buffer BlockCopy in its BinaryFormatter

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C  to convert a string to a byte array  public static byte   StrToByteArray string str        System Text ASCIIEncoding  encoding new System Text ASCIIEncoding        return encoding GetBytes str          C  to convert a byte array to a string  byte    dBytes       string str  System Text ASCIIEncoding enc   new System Text ASCIIEncoding    str   enc GetString dBytes

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Also please explain why encoding should be taken into consideration     Can t I simply get what bytes the string has been stored in    Why this dependency on encoding       Because there is no such thing as  the bytes of the string    A string  or more generically  a text  is composed of characters  letters  digits  and other symbols  That s all  Computers  however  do not know anything about characters  they can only handle bytes  Therefore  if you want to store or transmit text by using a computer  you need to transform the characters to bytes  How do you do that  Here s where encodings come to the scene   An encoding is nothing but a convention to translate logical characters to physical bytes  The simplest and best known encoding is ASCII  and it is all you need if you write in English  For other languages you will need more complete encodings  being any of the Unicode flavours the safest choice nowadays   So  in short  trying to  get the bytes of a string without using encodings  is as impossible as  writing a text without using any language    By the way  I strongly recommend you  and anyone  for that matter  to read this small piece of wisdom  The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely  Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets  No Excuses

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BinaryFormatter bf   new BinaryFormatter    byte   bytes  MemoryStream ms   new MemoryStream     string orig      Hello    Thank You   bf Serialize ms  orig   ms Seek 0  0   bytes   ms ToArray     MessageBox Show  Original bytes Length      bytes Length ToString      MessageBox Show  Original string Length      orig Length ToString      for  int i   0  i  lt  bytes Length    i  bytes i     168     pseudo encrypt for  int i   0  i  lt  bytes Length    i  bytes i     168     pseudo decrypt  BinaryFormatter bfx   new BinaryFormatter    MemoryStream msx   new MemoryStream                msx Write bytes  0  bytes Length   msx Seek 0  0   string sx    string bfx Deserialize msx    MessageBox Show  Still intact      sx    MessageBox Show  Deserialize string Length still intact            sx Length ToString      BinaryFormatter bfy   new BinaryFormatter    MemoryStream msy   new MemoryStream    bfy Serialize msy  sx   msy Seek 0  0   byte   bytesy   msy ToArray     MessageBox Show  Deserialize bytes Length still intact           bytesy Length ToString

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Use       string text    string       byte   array   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes text     The result is    0    115  1    116  2    114  3    105  4    110  5    103

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To convert a string to a byte   use the following solution   string s    abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz   byte   b   System Text UTF32Encoding GetBytes s     I hope it helps

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Contrary to the answers here  you DON T need to worry about encoding if the bytes don t need to be interpreted  Like you mentioned  your goal is  simply  to  quot get what bytes the string has been stored in quot    And  of course  to be able to re-construct the string from the bytes   For those goals  I honestly do not understand why people keep telling you that you need the encodings  You certainly do NOT need to worry about encodings for this  Just do this instead  static byte   GetBytes string str        byte   bytes   new byte str Length   sizeof char        System Buffer BlockCopy str ToCharArray    0  bytes  0  bytes Length       return bytes        Do NOT use on arbitrary bytes  only use on GetBytes s output on the SAME system static string GetString byte   bytes        char   chars   new char bytes Length   sizeof char        System Buffer BlockCopy bytes  0  chars  0  bytes Length       return new string chars      As long as your program  or other programs  don t try to interpret the bytes somehow  which you obviously didn t mention you intend to do  then there is nothing wrong with this approach  Worrying about encodings just makes your life more complicated for no real reason  Additional benefit to this approach  It doesn t matter if the string contains invalid characters  because you can still get the data and reconstruct the original string anyway  It will be encoded and decoded just the same  because you are just looking at the bytes  If you used a specific encoding  though  it would ve given you trouble with encoding decoding invalid characters

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You can use the following code for conversion between string and byte array   string s    Hello World       String to Byte    byte   byte1   System Text Encoding Default GetBytes s       OR  byte   byte2   System Text ASCIIEncoding Default GetBytes s       Byte   to string  string str   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetString byte1

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Also please explain why encoding should be taken into consideration     Can t I simply get what bytes the string has been stored in    Why this dependency on encoding       Because there is no such thing as  the bytes of the string    A string  or more generically  a text  is composed of characters  letters  digits  and other symbols  That s all  Computers  however  do not know anything about characters  they can only handle bytes  Therefore  if you want to store or transmit text by using a computer  you need to transform the characters to bytes  How do you do that  Here s where encodings come to the scene   An encoding is nothing but a convention to translate logical characters to physical bytes  The simplest and best known encoding is ASCII  and it is all you need if you write in English  For other languages you will need more complete encodings  being any of the Unicode flavours the safest choice nowadays   So  in short  trying to  get the bytes of a string without using encodings  is as impossible as  writing a text without using any language    By the way  I strongly recommend you  and anyone  for that matter  to read this small piece of wisdom  The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely  Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets  No Excuses

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The closest approach to the OP s question is Tom Blodget s  which actually goes into the object and extracts the bytes   I say closest because it depends on implementation of the String Object    Can t I simply get what bytes the string has been stored in     Sure  but that s where the fundamental error in the question arises   The String is an object which could have an interesting data structure   We already know it does  because it allows unpaired surrogates to be stored   It might store the length   It might keep a pointer to each of the  paired  surrogates allowing quick counting   Etc   All of these extra bytes are not part of the character data   What you want is each character s bytes in an array   And that is where  encoding  comes in   By default you will get UTF-16LE   If you don t care about the bytes themselves except for the round trip then you can choose any encoding including the  default   and convert it back later  assuming the same parameters such as what the default encoding was  code points  bug fixes  things allowed such as unpaired surrogates  etc   But why leave the  encoding  up to magic   Why not specify the encoding so that you know what bytes you are gonna get    Why is there a dependency on character encodings     Encoding  in this context  simply means the bytes that represent your string   Not the bytes of the string object   You wanted the bytes the string has been stored in -- this is where the question was asked naively   You wanted the bytes of string in a contiguous array that represent the string  and not all of the other binary data that a string object may contain   Which means how a string is stored is irrelevant   You want a string  Encoded  into bytes in a byte array   I like Tom Bloget s answer because he took you towards the  bytes of the string object  direction   It s implementation dependent though  and because he s peeking at internals it might be difficult to reconstitute a copy of the string   Mehrdad s response is wrong because it is misleading at the conceptual level   You still have a list of bytes  encoded   His particular solution allows for unpaired surrogates to be preserved -- this is implementation dependent   His particular solution would not produce the string s bytes accurately if GetBytes returned the string in UTF-8 by default     I ve changed my mind about this  Mehrdad s solution  -- this isn t getting the bytes of the string  rather it is getting the bytes of the character array that was created from the string   Regardless of encoding  the char datatype in c  is a fixed size   This allows a consistent length byte array to be produced  and it allows the character array to be reproduced based on the size of the byte array   So if the encoding were UTF-8  but each char was 6 bytes to accommodate the largest utf8 value  it would still work   So indeed -- encoding of the character does not matter   But a conversion was used -- each character was placed into a fixed size box  c  s character type    However what that representation is does not matter  which is technically the answer to the OP   So -- if you are going to convert anyway     Why not  encode

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It depends on what you want the bytes FOR  This is because  as Tyler so aptly said   Strings aren t pure data  They also have information   In this case  the information is an encoding that was assumed when the string was created    Assuming that you have binary data  rather than text  stored in a string  This is based off of OP s comment on his own question  and is the correct question if I understand OP s hints at the use-case   Storing binary data in strings is probably the wrong approach because of the assumed encoding mentioned above  Whatever program or library stored that binary data in a string  instead of a byte   array which would have been more appropriate  has already lost the battle before it has begun  If they are sending the bytes to you in a REST request response or anything that must transmit strings  Base64 would be the right approach   If you have a text string with an unknown encoding  Everybody else answered this incorrect question incorrectly   If the string looks good as-is  just pick an encoding  preferably one starting with UTF   use the corresponding System Text Encoding     GetBytes   function  and tell whoever you give the bytes to which encoding you picked

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This is a popular question  It is important to understand what the question author is asking  and that it is different from what is likely the most common need  To discourage misuse of the code where it is not needed  I ve answered the later first   Common Need  Every string has a character set and encoding  When you convert a System String object to an array of System Byte you still have a character set and encoding  For most usages  you d know which character set and encoding you need and  NET makes it simple to  copy with conversion   Just choose the appropriate Encoding class      using System Text  Encoding UTF8 GetBytes   NET String to byte array     The conversion may need to handle cases where the target character set or encoding doesn t support a character that s in the source  You have some choices  exception  substitution or skipping  The default policy is to substitute a           using System Text  var text   Encoding ASCII GetString Encoding ASCII GetBytes  You win    100                                                               - gt   You win  100    Clearly  conversions are not necessarily lossless   Note  For System String the source character set is Unicode    The only confusing thing is that  NET uses the name of a character set for the name of one particular encoding of that character set  Encoding Unicode should be called Encoding UTF16   That s it for most usages  If that s what you need  stop reading here  See the fun Joel Spolsky article if you don t understand what an encoding is   Specific Need  Now  the question author asks   Every string is stored as an array of bytes  right  Why can t I simply have those bytes    He doesn t want any conversion    From the C  spec      Character and string processing in C  uses Unicode encoding  The char   type represents a UTF-16 code unit  and the string type represents a   sequence of UTF-16 code units    So  we know that if we ask for the null conversion  i e   from UTF-16 to UTF-16   we ll get the desired result   Encoding Unicode GetBytes   NET String to byte array     But to avoid the mention of encodings  we must do it another way  If an intermediate data type is acceptable  there is a conceptual shortcut for this     NET String to byte array  ToCharArray     That doesn t get us the desired datatype but Mehrdad s answer shows how to convert this Char array to a Byte array using BlockCopy  However  this copies the string twice  And  it too explicitly uses encoding-specific code  the datatype System Char   The only way to get to the actual bytes the String is stored in is to use a pointer  The fixed statement allows taking the address of values  From the C  spec       For  an expression of type string      the initializer computes the   address of the first character in the string    To do so  the compiler writes code skip over the other parts of the string object with RuntimeHelpers OffsetToStringData  So  to get the raw bytes  just create a pointer to the string and copy the number of bytes needed      using System Runtime InteropServices unsafe byte   GetRawBytes String s        if  s    null  return null      var codeunitCount   s Length         We know that String is a sequence of UTF-16 codeunits         and such codeunits are 2 bytes        var byteCount   codeunitCount   2       var bytes   new byte byteCount       fixed void  pRaw   s                Marshal Copy  IntPtr pRaw  bytes  0  byteCount             return bytes      As  CodesInChaos pointed out  the result depends on the endianness of the machine  But the question author is not concerned with that

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OP s question   How do I convert a string to a byte array in  NET  C      sic   You can use the following code   static byte   ConvertString  string s        return new byte 0       As a benefit  encoding does not matter  Oh wait  this is an ecoding    it s just trivial and highly lossy

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The string can be converted to byte array in few different ways  due to the following fact   NET supports Unicode  and Unicode standardizes several difference encodings called UTFs  They have different lengths of byte representation but are equivalent in that sense that when a string is encoded  it can be coded back to the string  but if the string is encoded with one UTF and decoded in the assumption of different UTF if can be screwed up   Also   NET supports non-Unicode encodings  but they are not valid in general case  will be valid only if a limited sub-set of Unicode code point is used in an actual string  such as ASCII   Internally   NET supports UTF-16  but for stream representation  UTF-8 is usually used  It is also a standard-de-facto for Internet   Not surprisingly  serialization of string into an array of byte and deserialization is supported by the class System Text Encoding  which is an abstract class  its derived classes support concrete encodings  ASCIIEncoding and four UTFs  System Text UnicodeEncoding supports UTF-16   Ref this link   For serialization to an array of bytes using System Text Encoding GetBytes  For the inverse operation use System Text Encoding GetChars  This function returns an array of characters  so to get a string  use a string constructor System String char     Ref this page   Example   string myString         some string  System Text Encoding encoding   System Text Encoding UTF8    or some other  but prefer some UTF is Unicode is used byte   bytes   encoding GetBytes myString      next lines are written in response to a follow-up questions   myString   new string encoding GetChars bytes    byte   bytes   encoding GetBytes myString   myString   new string encoding GetChars bytes    byte   bytes   encoding GetBytes myString      how many times shall I repeat it to show there is a round-trip   -

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It depends on the encoding of your string  ASCII  UTF-8         For example   byte   b1   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  myString   byte   b2   System Text Encoding ASCII GetBytes  myString     A small sample why encoding matters   string pi     u03a0   byte   ascii   System Text Encoding ASCII GetBytes  pi   byte   utf8   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  pi    Console WriteLine  ascii Length     Will print 1 Console WriteLine  utf8 Length     Will print 2 Console WriteLine  System Text Encoding ASCII GetString  ascii      Will print       ASCII simply isn t equipped to deal with special characters   Internally  the  NET framework uses UTF-16 to represent strings  so if you simply want to get the exact bytes that  NET uses  use System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes         See Character Encoding in the  NET Framework  MSDN  for more information

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C  to convert a string to a byte array  public static byte   StrToByteArray string str        System Text ASCIIEncoding  encoding new System Text ASCIIEncoding        return encoding GetBytes str          C  to convert a byte array to a string  byte    dBytes       string str  System Text ASCIIEncoding enc   new System Text ASCIIEncoding    str   enc GetString dBytes

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Just to demonstrate that Mehrdrad s sound answer works  his approach can even persist the unpaired surrogate characters of which many had leveled against my answer  but of which everyone are equally guilty of  e g  System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes  those encoding methods can t persist the high surrogate characters d800 for example  and those just merely replace high surrogate characters with value fffd      using System   class Program            static void Main string   args                string t                             string s    Test ud800Test             byte   dumpToBytes   GetBytes s           string getItBack   GetString dumpToBytes            foreach  char item in getItBack                        Console WriteLine   0   1    item    ushort item  ToString  x                              static byte   GetBytes string str                byte   bytes   new byte str Length   sizeof char            System Buffer BlockCopy str ToCharArray    0  bytes  0  bytes Length           return bytes             static string GetString byte   bytes                char   chars   new char bytes Length   sizeof char            System Buffer BlockCopy bytes  0  chars  0  bytes Length           return new string chars                     Output   T 54 e 65 s 73 t 74   d800 T 54 e 65 s 73 t 74   Try that with System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes or System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes  they will merely replace high surrogate characters with value fffd  Every time there s a movement in this question  I m still thinking of a serializer be it from Microsoft or from 3rd party component  that can persist strings even it contains unpaired surrogate characters  I google this every now and then  serialization unpaired surrogate character  NET  This doesn t make me lose any sleep  but it s kind of annoying when every  now and then there s somebody commenting on my answer that it s flawed  yet their answers are equally flawed when it comes to unpaired surrogate characters   Darn  Microsoft should have just used System Buffer BlockCopy in its BinaryFormatter

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From byte   to string           return BitConverter ToString bytes

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OP s question   How do I convert a string to a byte array in  NET  C      sic   You can use the following code   static byte   ConvertString  string s        return new byte 0       As a benefit  encoding does not matter  Oh wait  this is an ecoding    it s just trivial and highly lossy

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Upon being asked what you intend to do with the bytes  you responded      I m going to encrypt it  I can encrypt it without converting but I d still like to know why encoding comes to play here  Just give me the bytes is what I say    Regardless of whether you intend to send this encrypted data over the network  load it back into memory later  or steam it to another process  you are clearly intending to decrypt it at some point  In that case  the answer is that you re defining a communication protocol  A communication protocol should not be defined in terms of implementation details of your programming language and its associated runtime  There are several reasons for this    You may need to communicate with a process implemented in a different language or runtime   This might include a server running on another machine or sending the string to a JavaScript browser client  for example   The program may be re-implemented in a different language or runtime in the future  The  NET implementation might change the internal representation of strings  You may think this sounds farfetched  but this actually happened in Java 9 to reduce memory usage  There s no reason  NET couldn t follow suit  Skeet suggests that UTF-16 probably isn t optimal today give the rise of the emoji and other blocks of Unicode needing more than 2 bytes to represent as well  increasing the likelihood that the internal representation could change in the future    For communicating  either with a completely disparate process or with the same program in the future   you need to define your protocol strictly to minimize the difficulty of working with it or accidentally creating bugs  Depending on  NET s internal representation is not a strict  clear  or even guaranteed to be consistent definition  A standard encoding is a strict definition that will not fail you in the future   In other words  you can t satisfy your requirement for consistency without specifying an encoding   You may certainly choose to use UTF-16 directly if you find that your process performs significantly better since  NET uses it internally or for any other reason  but you need to choose that encoding explicitly and perform those conversions explicitly in your code rather than depending on  NET s internal implementation   So choose an encoding and use it   using System Text           Encoding Unicode GetBytes  abc      UTF-16 little endian Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  abc     As you can see  it s also actually less code to just use the built in encoding objects than to implement your own reader writer methods

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C  to convert a string to a byte array  public static byte   StrToByteArray string str        System Text ASCIIEncoding  encoding new System Text ASCIIEncoding        return encoding GetBytes str          C  to convert a byte array to a string  byte    dBytes       string str  System Text ASCIIEncoding enc   new System Text ASCIIEncoding    str   enc GetString dBytes

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C  to convert a string to a byte array   public static byte   StrToByteArray string str       System Text UTF8Encoding  encoding new System Text UTF8Encoding       return encoding GetBytes str

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byte   strToByteArray string str        System Text ASCIIEncoding enc   new System Text ASCIIEncoding        return enc GetBytes str

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It depends on what you want the bytes FOR  This is because  as Tyler so aptly said   Strings aren t pure data  They also have information   In this case  the information is an encoding that was assumed when the string was created    Assuming that you have binary data  rather than text  stored in a string  This is based off of OP s comment on his own question  and is the correct question if I understand OP s hints at the use-case   Storing binary data in strings is probably the wrong approach because of the assumed encoding mentioned above  Whatever program or library stored that binary data in a string  instead of a byte   array which would have been more appropriate  has already lost the battle before it has begun  If they are sending the bytes to you in a REST request response or anything that must transmit strings  Base64 would be the right approach   If you have a text string with an unknown encoding  Everybody else answered this incorrect question incorrectly   If the string looks good as-is  just pick an encoding  preferably one starting with UTF   use the corresponding System Text Encoding     GetBytes   function  and tell whoever you give the bytes to which encoding you picked

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The first part of your question  how to get the bytes  was already answered by others  look in the System Text Encoding namespace   I will address your follow-up question  why do you need to pick an encoding   Why can t you get that from the string class itself   The answer is in two parts   First of all  the bytes used internally by the string class don t matter  and whenever you assume they do you re likely introducing a bug     If your program is entirely within the  Net world then you don t need to worry about getting byte arrays for strings at all  even if you re sending data across a network  Instead  use  Net Serialization to worry about transmitting the data   You don t worry about the actual bytes any more  the Serialization formatter does it for you   On the other hand  what if you are sending these bytes somewhere that you can t guarantee will pull in data from a  Net serialized stream  In this case you definitely do need to worry about encoding  because obviously this external system cares  So again  the internal bytes used by the string don t matter  you need to pick an encoding so you can be explicit about this encoding on the receiving end  even if it s the same encoding used internally by  Net     I understand that in this case you might prefer to use the actual bytes stored by the string variable in memory where possible  with the idea that it might save some work creating your byte stream  However  I put it to you it s just not important compared to making sure that your output is understood at the other end  and to guarantee that you must be explicit with your encoding  Additionally  if you really want to match your internal bytes  you can already just choose the Unicode encoding  and get that performance savings   Which brings me to the second part    picking the Unicode encoding is telling  Net to use the underlying bytes  You do need to pick this encoding  because when some new-fangled Unicode-Plus comes out the  Net runtime needs to be free to use this newer  better encoding model without breaking your program  But  for the moment  and forseeable future   just choosing the Unicode encoding gives you what you want   It s also important to understand your string has to be re-written to wire  and that involves at least some translation of the bit-pattern even when you use a matching encoding  The computer needs to account for things like Big vs Little Endian  network byte order  packetization  session information  etc

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I have written a Visual Basic extension similar to the accepted answer  but directly using  NET memory and Marshalling for conversion  and it supports character ranges unsupported in other methods  like UnicodeEncoding UTF8 GetString or UnicodeEncoding UTF32 GetString or even MemoryStream and BinaryFormatter  invalid characters like    amp  ChrW 55906   amp  ChrW 55655        lt Extension gt    Public Function ToBytesMarshal ByRef str As String  As Byte       Dim gch As GCHandle   GCHandle Alloc str  GCHandleType Pinned      Dim handle As IntPtr   gch AddrOfPinnedObject     ToBytesMarshal   New Byte str Length   2 - 1         Try         For i As Integer   0 To ToBytesMarshal Length - 1             ToBytesMarshal SetValue Marshal ReadByte IntPtr Add handle  i    i          Next     Finally         gch Free       End Try End Function   lt Extension gt    Public Function ToStringMarshal ByRef arr As Byte    As String     Dim gch As GCHandle   GCHandle Alloc arr  GCHandleType Pinned      Try         ToStringMarshal   Marshal PtrToStringAuto gch AddrOfPinnedObject      Finally         gch Free       End Try End Function

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I m not sure  but I think the string stores its info as an array of Chars  which is inefficient with bytes   Specifically  the definition of a Char is  Represents a Unicode character    take this example sample   String str    asdf        String str2    asdf gh   EncodingInfo   info    Encoding GetEncodings    foreach  EncodingInfo enc in info        System Console WriteLine enc Name     -            enc GetEncoding   GetByteCount str          enc GetEncoding   GetByteCount str2        Take note that the Unicode answer is 14 bytes in both instances  whereas the UTF-8 answer is only 9 bytes for the first  and only 7 for the second   So if you just want the bytes used by the string  simply use Encoding Unicode  but it will be inefficient with storage space

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It depends on the encoding of your string  ASCII  UTF-8         For example   byte   b1   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  myString   byte   b2   System Text Encoding ASCII GetBytes  myString     A small sample why encoding matters   string pi     u03a0   byte   ascii   System Text Encoding ASCII GetBytes  pi   byte   utf8   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  pi    Console WriteLine  ascii Length     Will print 1 Console WriteLine  utf8 Length     Will print 2 Console WriteLine  System Text Encoding ASCII GetString  ascii      Will print       ASCII simply isn t equipped to deal with special characters   Internally  the  NET framework uses UTF-16 to represent strings  so if you simply want to get the exact bytes that  NET uses  use System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes         See Character Encoding in the  NET Framework  MSDN  for more information

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C  to convert a string to a byte array   public static byte   StrToByteArray string str       System Text UTF8Encoding  encoding new System Text UTF8Encoding       return encoding GetBytes str

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It depends on the encoding of your string  ASCII  UTF-8         For example   byte   b1   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  myString   byte   b2   System Text Encoding ASCII GetBytes  myString     A small sample why encoding matters   string pi     u03a0   byte   ascii   System Text Encoding ASCII GetBytes  pi   byte   utf8   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  pi    Console WriteLine  ascii Length     Will print 1 Console WriteLine  utf8 Length     Will print 2 Console WriteLine  System Text Encoding ASCII GetString  ascii      Will print       ASCII simply isn t equipped to deal with special characters   Internally  the  NET framework uses UTF-16 to represent strings  so if you simply want to get the exact bytes that  NET uses  use System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes         See Character Encoding in the  NET Framework  MSDN  for more information

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The key issue is that a glyph in a string takes 32 bits  16 bits for a character code  but a byte only has 8 bits to spare   A one-to-one mapping doesn t exist unless you restrict yourself to strings that only contain ASCII characters   System Text Encoding has lots of ways to map a string to byte    you need to pick one that avoids loss of information and that is easy to use by your client when she needs to map the byte   back to a string   Utf8 is a popular encoding  it is compact and not lossy

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It depends on the encoding of your string  ASCII  UTF-8         For example   byte   b1   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  myString   byte   b2   System Text Encoding ASCII GetBytes  myString     A small sample why encoding matters   string pi     u03a0   byte   ascii   System Text Encoding ASCII GetBytes  pi   byte   utf8   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes  pi    Console WriteLine  ascii Length     Will print 1 Console WriteLine  utf8 Length     Will print 2 Console WriteLine  System Text Encoding ASCII GetString  ascii      Will print       ASCII simply isn t equipped to deal with special characters   Internally  the  NET framework uses UTF-16 to represent strings  so if you simply want to get the exact bytes that  NET uses  use System Text Encoding Unicode GetBytes         See Character Encoding in the  NET Framework  MSDN  for more information

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I m not sure  but I think the string stores its info as an array of Chars  which is inefficient with bytes   Specifically  the definition of a Char is  Represents a Unicode character    take this example sample   String str    asdf        String str2    asdf gh   EncodingInfo   info    Encoding GetEncodings    foreach  EncodingInfo enc in info        System Console WriteLine enc Name     -            enc GetEncoding   GetByteCount str          enc GetEncoding   GetByteCount str2        Take note that the Unicode answer is 14 bytes in both instances  whereas the UTF-8 answer is only 9 bytes for the first  and only 7 for the second   So if you just want the bytes used by the string  simply use Encoding Unicode  but it will be inefficient with storage space

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simple code with LINQ  string s    abc  byte   b   s Select e   gt   byte e  ToArray      EDIT   as commented below  it is not a good way   but you can still use it to understand LINQ with a more appropriate coding    string s    abc  byte   b   s Cast lt byte gt    ToArray

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simple code with LINQ  string s    abc  byte   b   s Select e   gt   byte e  ToArray      EDIT   as commented below  it is not a good way   but you can still use it to understand LINQ with a more appropriate coding    string s    abc  byte   b   s Cast lt byte gt    ToArray

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Simply use this    byte   myByte  System Text ASCIIEncoding Default GetBytes myString

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Fastest way  public static byte   GetBytes string text        return System Text ASCIIEncoding UTF8 GetBytes text       EDIT as Makotosan commented this is now the best way   Encoding UTF8 GetBytes text

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This is a popular question  It is important to understand what the question author is asking  and that it is different from what is likely the most common need  To discourage misuse of the code where it is not needed  I ve answered the later first   Common Need  Every string has a character set and encoding  When you convert a System String object to an array of System Byte you still have a character set and encoding  For most usages  you d know which character set and encoding you need and  NET makes it simple to  copy with conversion   Just choose the appropriate Encoding class      using System Text  Encoding UTF8 GetBytes   NET String to byte array     The conversion may need to handle cases where the target character set or encoding doesn t support a character that s in the source  You have some choices  exception  substitution or skipping  The default policy is to substitute a           using System Text  var text   Encoding ASCII GetString Encoding ASCII GetBytes  You win    100                                                               - gt   You win  100    Clearly  conversions are not necessarily lossless   Note  For System String the source character set is Unicode    The only confusing thing is that  NET uses the name of a character set for the name of one particular encoding of that character set  Encoding Unicode should be called Encoding UTF16   That s it for most usages  If that s what you need  stop reading here  See the fun Joel Spolsky article if you don t understand what an encoding is   Specific Need  Now  the question author asks   Every string is stored as an array of bytes  right  Why can t I simply have those bytes    He doesn t want any conversion    From the C  spec      Character and string processing in C  uses Unicode encoding  The char   type represents a UTF-16 code unit  and the string type represents a   sequence of UTF-16 code units    So  we know that if we ask for the null conversion  i e   from UTF-16 to UTF-16   we ll get the desired result   Encoding Unicode GetBytes   NET String to byte array     But to avoid the mention of encodings  we must do it another way  If an intermediate data type is acceptable  there is a conceptual shortcut for this     NET String to byte array  ToCharArray     That doesn t get us the desired datatype but Mehrdad s answer shows how to convert this Char array to a Byte array using BlockCopy  However  this copies the string twice  And  it too explicitly uses encoding-specific code  the datatype System Char   The only way to get to the actual bytes the String is stored in is to use a pointer  The fixed statement allows taking the address of values  From the C  spec       For  an expression of type string      the initializer computes the   address of the first character in the string    To do so  the compiler writes code skip over the other parts of the string object with RuntimeHelpers OffsetToStringData  So  to get the raw bytes  just create a pointer to the string and copy the number of bytes needed      using System Runtime InteropServices unsafe byte   GetRawBytes String s        if  s    null  return null      var codeunitCount   s Length         We know that String is a sequence of UTF-16 codeunits         and such codeunits are 2 bytes        var byteCount   codeunitCount   2       var bytes   new byte byteCount       fixed void  pRaw   s                Marshal Copy  IntPtr pRaw  bytes  0  byteCount             return bytes      As  CodesInChaos pointed out  the result depends on the endianness of the machine  But the question author is not concerned with that

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You need to take the encoding into account  because 1 character could be represented by 1 or more bytes  up to about 6   and different encodings will treat these bytes differently   Joel has a posting on this      The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely  Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets  No Excuses

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I had to convert a string to a byte array for a serial communication project - I had to handle 8-bit characters  and I was unable to find a method using the framework converters to do so that didn t either add two-byte entries or mis-translate the bytes with the eighth bit set   So I did the following  which works   string message    This is a message    byte   bytes   new byte message Length   for  int i   0  i  lt  message Length  i        bytes i     byte message i

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The first part of your question  how to get the bytes  was already answered by others  look in the System Text Encoding namespace   I will address your follow-up question  why do you need to pick an encoding   Why can t you get that from the string class itself   The answer is in two parts   First of all  the bytes used internally by the string class don t matter  and whenever you assume they do you re likely introducing a bug     If your program is entirely within the  Net world then you don t need to worry about getting byte arrays for strings at all  even if you re sending data across a network  Instead  use  Net Serialization to worry about transmitting the data   You don t worry about the actual bytes any more  the Serialization formatter does it for you   On the other hand  what if you are sending these bytes somewhere that you can t guarantee will pull in data from a  Net serialized stream  In this case you definitely do need to worry about encoding  because obviously this external system cares  So again  the internal bytes used by the string don t matter  you need to pick an encoding so you can be explicit about this encoding on the receiving end  even if it s the same encoding used internally by  Net     I understand that in this case you might prefer to use the actual bytes stored by the string variable in memory where possible  with the idea that it might save some work creating your byte stream  However  I put it to you it s just not important compared to making sure that your output is understood at the other end  and to guarantee that you must be explicit with your encoding  Additionally  if you really want to match your internal bytes  you can already just choose the Unicode encoding  and get that performance savings   Which brings me to the second part    picking the Unicode encoding is telling  Net to use the underlying bytes  You do need to pick this encoding  because when some new-fangled Unicode-Plus comes out the  Net runtime needs to be free to use this newer  better encoding model without breaking your program  But  for the moment  and forseeable future   just choosing the Unicode encoding gives you what you want   It s also important to understand your string has to be re-written to wire  and that involves at least some translation of the bit-pattern even when you use a matching encoding  The computer needs to account for things like Big vs Little Endian  network byte order  packetization  session information  etc

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BinaryFormatter bf   new BinaryFormatter    byte   bytes  MemoryStream ms   new MemoryStream     string orig      Hello    Thank You   bf Serialize ms  orig   ms Seek 0  0   bytes   ms ToArray     MessageBox Show  Original bytes Length      bytes Length ToString      MessageBox Show  Original string Length      orig Length ToString      for  int i   0  i  lt  bytes Length    i  bytes i     168     pseudo encrypt for  int i   0  i  lt  bytes Length    i  bytes i     168     pseudo decrypt  BinaryFormatter bfx   new BinaryFormatter    MemoryStream msx   new MemoryStream                msx Write bytes  0  bytes Length   msx Seek 0  0   string sx    string bfx Deserialize msx    MessageBox Show  Still intact      sx    MessageBox Show  Deserialize string Length still intact            sx Length ToString      BinaryFormatter bfy   new BinaryFormatter    MemoryStream msy   new MemoryStream    bfy Serialize msy  sx   msy Seek 0  0   byte   bytesy   msy ToArray     MessageBox Show  Deserialize bytes Length still intact           bytesy Length ToString

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You can use the following code for conversion between string and byte array   string s    Hello World       String to Byte    byte   byte1   System Text Encoding Default GetBytes s       OR  byte   byte2   System Text ASCIIEncoding Default GetBytes s       Byte   to string  string str   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetString byte1

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I m not sure  but I think the string stores its info as an array of Chars  which is inefficient with bytes   Specifically  the definition of a Char is  Represents a Unicode character    take this example sample   String str    asdf        String str2    asdf gh   EncodingInfo   info    Encoding GetEncodings    foreach  EncodingInfo enc in info        System Console WriteLine enc Name     -            enc GetEncoding   GetByteCount str          enc GetEncoding   GetByteCount str2        Take note that the Unicode answer is 14 bytes in both instances  whereas the UTF-8 answer is only 9 bytes for the first  and only 7 for the second   So if you just want the bytes used by the string  simply use Encoding Unicode  but it will be inefficient with storage space

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BinaryFormatter bf   new BinaryFormatter    byte   bytes  MemoryStream ms   new MemoryStream     string orig      Hello    Thank You   bf Serialize ms  orig   ms Seek 0  0   bytes   ms ToArray     MessageBox Show  Original bytes Length      bytes Length ToString      MessageBox Show  Original string Length      orig Length ToString      for  int i   0  i  lt  bytes Length    i  bytes i     168     pseudo encrypt for  int i   0  i  lt  bytes Length    i  bytes i     168     pseudo decrypt  BinaryFormatter bfx   new BinaryFormatter    MemoryStream msx   new MemoryStream                msx Write bytes  0  bytes Length   msx Seek 0  0   string sx    string bfx Deserialize msx    MessageBox Show  Still intact      sx    MessageBox Show  Deserialize string Length still intact            sx Length ToString      BinaryFormatter bfy   new BinaryFormatter    MemoryStream msy   new MemoryStream    bfy Serialize msy  sx   msy Seek 0  0   byte   bytesy   msy ToArray     MessageBox Show  Deserialize bytes Length still intact           bytesy Length ToString

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The first part of your question  how to get the bytes  was already answered by others  look in the System Text Encoding namespace   I will address your follow-up question  why do you need to pick an encoding   Why can t you get that from the string class itself   The answer is in two parts   First of all  the bytes used internally by the string class don t matter  and whenever you assume they do you re likely introducing a bug     If your program is entirely within the  Net world then you don t need to worry about getting byte arrays for strings at all  even if you re sending data across a network  Instead  use  Net Serialization to worry about transmitting the data   You don t worry about the actual bytes any more  the Serialization formatter does it for you   On the other hand  what if you are sending these bytes somewhere that you can t guarantee will pull in data from a  Net serialized stream  In this case you definitely do need to worry about encoding  because obviously this external system cares  So again  the internal bytes used by the string don t matter  you need to pick an encoding so you can be explicit about this encoding on the receiving end  even if it s the same encoding used internally by  Net     I understand that in this case you might prefer to use the actual bytes stored by the string variable in memory where possible  with the idea that it might save some work creating your byte stream  However  I put it to you it s just not important compared to making sure that your output is understood at the other end  and to guarantee that you must be explicit with your encoding  Additionally  if you really want to match your internal bytes  you can already just choose the Unicode encoding  and get that performance savings   Which brings me to the second part    picking the Unicode encoding is telling  Net to use the underlying bytes  You do need to pick this encoding  because when some new-fangled Unicode-Plus comes out the  Net runtime needs to be free to use this newer  better encoding model without breaking your program  But  for the moment  and forseeable future   just choosing the Unicode encoding gives you what you want   It s also important to understand your string has to be re-written to wire  and that involves at least some translation of the bit-pattern even when you use a matching encoding  The computer needs to account for things like Big vs Little Endian  network byte order  packetization  session information  etc

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byte   strToByteArray string str        System Text ASCIIEncoding enc   new System Text ASCIIEncoding        return enc GetBytes str

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With the advent of Span lt T gt  released with C  7 2  the canonical technique to capture the underlying memory representation of a string into a managed byte array is   byte   bytes    rubbish  u9999 string  AsSpan   AsBytes   ToArray      Converting it back should be a non-starter because that means you are in fact interpreting the data somehow  but for the sake of completeness   string s  unsafe       fixed  char  f    amp bytes AsSpan   NonPortableCast lt byte  char gt    DangerousGetPinnableReference                  s   new string f             The names NonPortableCast and DangerousGetPinnableReference should further the argument that you probably shouldn t be doing this   Note that working with Span lt T gt  requires installing the System Memory NuGet package   Regardless  the actual original question and follow-up comments imply that the underlying memory is not being  interpreted   which I assume means is not modified or read beyond the need to write it as-is   indicating that some implementation of the Stream class should be used instead of reasoning about the data as strings at all

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You need to take the encoding into account  because 1 character could be represented by 1 or more bytes  up to about 6   and different encodings will treat these bytes differently   Joel has a posting on this      The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely  Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets  No Excuses

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The accepted answer is very  very complicated  Use the included  NET classes for this   const string data    A string with international characters  Norwegian                Chinese         var bytes   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes data   var decoded   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetString bytes     Don t reinvent the wheel if you don t have to

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BinaryFormatter bf   new BinaryFormatter    byte   bytes  MemoryStream ms   new MemoryStream     string orig      Hello    Thank You   bf Serialize ms  orig   ms Seek 0  0   bytes   ms ToArray     MessageBox Show  Original bytes Length      bytes Length ToString      MessageBox Show  Original string Length      orig Length ToString      for  int i   0  i  lt  bytes Length    i  bytes i     168     pseudo encrypt for  int i   0  i  lt  bytes Length    i  bytes i     168     pseudo decrypt  BinaryFormatter bfx   new BinaryFormatter    MemoryStream msx   new MemoryStream                msx Write bytes  0  bytes Length   msx Seek 0  0   string sx    string bfx Deserialize msx    MessageBox Show  Still intact      sx    MessageBox Show  Deserialize string Length still intact            sx Length ToString      BinaryFormatter bfy   new BinaryFormatter    MemoryStream msy   new MemoryStream    bfy Serialize msy  sx   msy Seek 0  0   byte   bytesy   msy ToArray     MessageBox Show  Deserialize bytes Length still intact           bytesy Length ToString

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A character is both a lookup key into a font table and a lexical tradition such as ordering  upper and lower case versions  etc   Consequently  a character is not a byte  8-bits  and a byte is not a character  In particular  the 256 permutations of a byte cannot accommodate the thousands of symbols within some written languages  much less all languages  Hence  various methods for encoding characters have been devised  Some encode for a particular class of languages  ASCII encoding   multiple languages using code pages  Extended ASCII   or  ambitiously  all languages by selectively including additional bytes as needed  Unicode   Within a system  such as the  NET framework  a String implies a particular character encoding  In  NET this encoding is Unicode  Since the framework reads and writes Unicode by default  dealing with character encoding is typically not necessary in  NET   However  in general  to load a character string into the system from a byte stream you need to know the source encoding to therefore interpret and subsequently translate it correctly  otherwise the codes will be taken as already being in the system s default encoding and thus render gibberish   Similarly  when a string is written to an external source  it will be written in a particular encoding

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From byte   to string           return BitConverter ToString bytes

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I m not sure  but I think the string stores its info as an array of Chars  which is inefficient with bytes   Specifically  the definition of a Char is  Represents a Unicode character    take this example sample   String str    asdf        String str2    asdf gh   EncodingInfo   info    Encoding GetEncodings    foreach  EncodingInfo enc in info        System Console WriteLine enc Name     -            enc GetEncoding   GetByteCount str          enc GetEncoding   GetByteCount str2        Take note that the Unicode answer is 14 bytes in both instances  whereas the UTF-8 answer is only 9 bytes for the first  and only 7 for the second   So if you just want the bytes used by the string  simply use Encoding Unicode  but it will be inefficient with storage space

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I had to convert a string to a byte array for a serial communication project - I had to handle 8-bit characters  and I was unable to find a method using the framework converters to do so that didn t either add two-byte entries or mis-translate the bytes with the eighth bit set   So I did the following  which works   string message    This is a message    byte   bytes   new byte message Length   for  int i   0  i  lt  message Length  i        bytes i     byte message i

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With the advent of Span lt T gt  released with C  7 2  the canonical technique to capture the underlying memory representation of a string into a managed byte array is   byte   bytes    rubbish  u9999 string  AsSpan   AsBytes   ToArray      Converting it back should be a non-starter because that means you are in fact interpreting the data somehow  but for the sake of completeness   string s  unsafe       fixed  char  f    amp bytes AsSpan   NonPortableCast lt byte  char gt    DangerousGetPinnableReference                  s   new string f             The names NonPortableCast and DangerousGetPinnableReference should further the argument that you probably shouldn t be doing this   Note that working with Span lt T gt  requires installing the System Memory NuGet package   Regardless  the actual original question and follow-up comments imply that the underlying memory is not being  interpreted   which I assume means is not modified or read beyond the need to write it as-is   indicating that some implementation of the Stream class should be used instead of reasoning about the data as strings at all

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A character is both a lookup key into a font table and a lexical tradition such as ordering  upper and lower case versions  etc   Consequently  a character is not a byte  8-bits  and a byte is not a character  In particular  the 256 permutations of a byte cannot accommodate the thousands of symbols within some written languages  much less all languages  Hence  various methods for encoding characters have been devised  Some encode for a particular class of languages  ASCII encoding   multiple languages using code pages  Extended ASCII   or  ambitiously  all languages by selectively including additional bytes as needed  Unicode   Within a system  such as the  NET framework  a String implies a particular character encoding  In  NET this encoding is Unicode  Since the framework reads and writes Unicode by default  dealing with character encoding is typically not necessary in  NET   However  in general  to load a character string into the system from a byte stream you need to know the source encoding to therefore interpret and subsequently translate it correctly  otherwise the codes will be taken as already being in the system s default encoding and thus render gibberish   Similarly  when a string is written to an external source  it will be written in a particular encoding

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If you are using  NET Core or System Memory for  NET Framework  there is a very efficient marshaling mechanism available via Span lt T gt  and Memory lt T gt  that can effectively reinterpret string memory as a span of bytes  Once you have a span of bytes you are free to marshal back to another type  or copy the span to an array for serialization  To summarize what others have said   Storing a representation of this kind of serialization is sensitive to system endianness  compiler optimizations  and changes to the internal representation of strings in the executing  NET Runtime   Avoid long-term storage Avoid deserializing or interpreting the string in other environments  This includes other machines  processor architectures   NET runtimes  containers  etc  This includes comparisons  formatting  encryption  string manipulation  localization  character transforms  etc    Avoid making assumptions about the character encoding  The default encoding tends to be UTF-16LE in practice  but the compiler   runtime can choose any internal representation      Implementation public static class MarshalExtensions      public static ReadOnlySpan lt byte gt  AsBytes this string value    gt  MemoryMarshal AsBytes value AsSpan        public static string AsString this ReadOnlySpan lt byte gt  value    gt  new string MemoryMarshal Cast lt byte  char gt  value       Example static void Main string   args        string str1    quot       quot       ReadOnlySpan lt byte gt  span   str1 AsBytes        string str2   span AsString         byte   bytes   span ToArray         Debug Assert bytes Length  gt  0       Debug Assert str1    str2      Furthur Insight In C   this is roughly equivalent to reinterpret cast  and C this is roughly equivalent to a cast to the system s word type  char   In recent versions of the  NET Core Runtime  CoreCLR   operations on spans effectively invoke compiler intrinsics and various optimizations that can sometimes eliminate bounds checking  leading to exceptional performance while preserving memory safety  assuming that your memory was allocated by the CLR and the spans are not derived from pointers from an unmanaged memory allocator  Caveats This uses a mechanism supported by the CLR that returns ReadOnlySpan lt char gt  from a string  Additionally  this span does not necessarily encompass the complete internal string layout  ReadOnlySpan lt T gt  implies that you must create a copy if you need to perform mutation  as strings are immutable

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The accepted answer is very  very complicated  Use the included  NET classes for this   const string data    A string with international characters  Norwegian                Chinese         var bytes   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetBytes data   var decoded   System Text Encoding UTF8 GetString bytes     Don t reinvent the wheel if you don t have to

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Simply use this    byte   myByte  System Text ASCIIEncoding Default GetBytes myString

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To convert a string to a byte   use the following solution   string s    abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz   byte   b   System Text UTF32Encoding GetBytes s     I hope it helps

[c#] How do I get a consistent byte representation of strings in C# without manually specifying an encoding?

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