How to convert UTF-8 byte[] to string?

Question

I have a byte[] array that is loaded from a file that I happen to known contains UTF-8.

In some debugging code, I need to convert it to a string. Is

Answer 1

Using (byte)b.ToString("x2"), Outputs b4b5dfe475e58b67

public static class Ext {

    public static string ToHexString(this byte[] hex)
    {
        if (hex == null) return null;
        if (hex.Length == 0) return string.Empty;

        var s = new StringBuilder();
        foreach (byte b in hex) {
            s.Append(b.ToString("x2"));
        }
        return s.ToString();
    }

    public static byte[] ToHexBytes(this string hex)
    {
        if (hex == null) return null;
        if (hex.Length == 0) return new byte[0];

        int l = hex.Length / 2;
        var b = new byte[l];
        for (int i = 0; i < l; ++i) {
            b[i] = Convert.ToByte(hex.Substring(i * 2, 2), 16);
        }
        return b;
    }

    public static bool EqualsTo(this byte[] bytes, byte[] bytesToCompare)
    {
        if (bytes == null && bytesToCompare == null) return true; // ?
        if (bytes == null || bytesToCompare == null) return false;
        if (object.ReferenceEquals(bytes, bytesToCompare)) return true;

        if (bytes.Length != bytesToCompare.Length) return false;

        for (int i = 0; i < bytes.Length; ++i) {
            if (bytes[i] != bytesToCompare[i]) return false;
        }
        return true;
    }

}

Answer 2

There is also class UnicodeEncoding, quite simple in usage:

ByteConverter = new UnicodeEncoding();
string stringDataForEncoding = "My Secret Data!";
byte[] dataEncoded = ByteConverter.GetBytes(stringDataForEncoding);

Console.WriteLine("Data after decoding: {0}", ByteConverter.GetString(dataEncoded));

Answer 3

To my knowledge none of the given answers guarantee correct behavior with null termination. Until someone shows me differently I wrote my own static class for handling this with the following methods:

// Mimics the functionality of strlen() in c/c++
// Needed because niether StringBuilder or Encoding.*.GetString() handle \0 well
static int StringLength(byte[] buffer, int startIndex = 0)
{
    int strlen = 0;
    while
    (
        (startIndex + strlen + 1) < buffer.Length // Make sure incrementing won't break any bounds
        && buffer[startIndex + strlen] != 0       // The typical null terimation check
    )
    {
        ++strlen;
    }
    return strlen;
}

// This is messy, but I haven't found a built-in way in c# that guarentees null termination
public static string ParseBytes(byte[] buffer, out int strlen, int startIndex = 0)
{
    strlen = StringLength(buffer, startIndex);
    byte[] c_str = new byte[strlen];
    Array.Copy(buffer, startIndex, c_str, 0, strlen);
    return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(c_str);
}

The reason for the startIndex was in the example I was working on specifically I needed to parse a byte[] as an array of null terminated strings. It can be safely ignored in the simple case