How to serialize byte array to XML using XmlSerializer in C#?

Question

Say we have a struct that it\'s data is provided by un-managed byte array using Marshal.PtrToStructure.

The C# struct layout:

[StructLayout(LayoutKin         


        

Answer 1

The XmlSerializer by default will encode the byte arrays using base 64 encoding. If you use this site and paste in IzE=, and decode it, the result will be #1. You can change the encoding by setting the XmlElementAttribute.DataType. I'm not sure if [XmlElement(DataType = "string")] will work, but you can try it. Using [XmlElement(DataType = "hexBinary")] will generate the raw bytes.

Answer 2

This is how I did it:

public class MySerializableClass
{
    private string dummy;

    [XmlElement("NaughtyXmlCharacters")]
    public string NaughtyXmlCharactersAsString
    {
       get 
       {
           return BitConverter.ToString(NaughtyXmlCharacters);
       }
       set
       {
           // without this, the property is not serialized.
           dummy = value;
       }
    }

    [XmlIgnore]
    public byte[] NaughtyXmlCharacters
    {
        get;
        set;
    }
}

The bytes are then formatted as hexadecimal values and separated with a minus sign: 00-AF-B1

Answer 3

I got this to work using the following:

  public class MySerializableClass
  {   
    [XmlIgnore]
    public string NaughtyXmlCharactersAsString { get; set; }

    [XmlElement(ElementName = "NaughtyXmlCharacters", DataType = "hexBinary")]
    public byte[] NaughtyXmlCharactersAsBytes
    {
        get { return Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(NaughtyCharactersAsString ?? string.Empty); }
        set { NaughtyXmlCharactersAsString = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(value); }
    }

I would then only access the "AsString" version of the property.