Storing a string as UTF8 in C#

Question

I\'m doing a lot of string manipulation in C#, and really need the strings to be stored one byte per character. This is because I need gigabytes of text simultaneously in memory

Answer 1

Well, you could create a wrapper that retrieves the data as UTF-8 bytes and converts pieces as needed to System.String, then vice-versa to push the string back out to memory. The Encoding class will help you out here:

var utf8 = Encoding.UTF8;
byte[] utfBytes = utf8.GetBytes(myString);

var myReturnedString = utf8.GetString(utfBytes);