Create properly escaped string from byte array

Question

I have a byte array, read from an image file, that I am trying to send from C# across a socket to a Meteor server running collectionFS (v0.3.7).

I am trying to convert it to a string to match the result I would get from calling FileReader.readAsBinaryString() in JavaScript, for example:

?PNG\r\n\u001a\n\u0000\u0000\u0000\rIHDR\u0000\u0000\u0003?\u0000\u0000\u0002?

In my C# code, I have tried using System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString() , which gives me something like this:

�PNG\r\n\n\0\0\0\rIHDR\0\0�\0\0

This fails on the transfer, presumably because the '\\0' is treated like the end of the string.

Can anyone better explain what is happening here? Is there a nice way in C# to format the bytes using the unicode escape sequences like readAsBinaryString() does?

EDIT: The eventual destination for this data is a BSON binary entry in MongoDB (in Meteor), to be later extracted (as a Blob) and viewed through the normal Meteor web browser client.

Answer 1

There is no built in method that does exactly that.

To transform byte array to encoded you need to decide what is encoded and what is not. Looks like 0-9a-zA-Z range should not be encoded and the rest encoded as \\uXXXX :

I'd do something like following:

var result = String.Join("", byteArray
   .Select(b => b >'0' && b <'9' ? 
       (char)b.ToString() : String.Format(@"\u{0:x4}", b)));