Whats going on with this byte array?

Question

I have a byte array: 00 01 00 00 00 12 81 00 00 01 00 C8 00 00 00 00 00 08 5C 9F 4F A5 09 45 D4 CE

It is read via StreamReader using UTF

Answer 1

The original byte array is not encoded as UTF-8. The StreamReader therefore replaces each invalid byte with the replacement character U+FFFD. When that character gets encoded back to UTF-8, this results in the byte sequence EF BF BD. You cannot construct the original byte value from the string because the information is completely lost.