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Convert string of integers to ASCII chars

What is the best way to convert a string of digits into their equivalent ASCII characters?
I think that I am over-complicating this.
Console.WriteLine($"Enter the word to decrypt: ");
//store the values to convert into a string
string vWord = Console.ReadLine();
for (int i = 0; i < vWord.Length; i++)
{
int convertedIndex = vWord[i];
char character = (char)convertedIndex;
finalValue += character.ToString();
Console.WriteLine($"Input: {vWord[i]} Index: {convertedIndex} Char {character}");
}

If the expected input values are something like this: 65 66 67 97 98 99, you could just split the input and cast the converted int values to char:
string vWord = "65 66 67 97 98 99";
string result = string.Join("", vWord.Split().Select(n => (char)(int.Parse(n))));
Console.WriteLine($"Result string: {result}");
This method, however, doesn't perform any error checking on the input string. When dealing with user input, this is not a great idea. We better use int.TryParse() to validate the input parts:
var result = new StringBuilder();
var ASCIIValues = vWord.Split();
foreach (string CharValue in ASCIIValues) {
if (int.TryParse(CharValue, out int n) && n < 127) {
result.Append((char)n);
}
else {
Console.WriteLine($"{CharValue} is not a vaid input");
break;
}
}
Console.WriteLine($"Result string: {result.ToString()}");
You could also use the Encoding.ASCII.GetString method to convert to string the Byte array generated by the byte.Parse method. For example, using LINQ's Select:
string vWord = "65 66 67 97 98 267";
try
{
var CharArray = vWord.Split().Select(n => byte.Parse(n)).ToArray();
string result = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(CharArray);
Console.WriteLine($"String result: {result}");
}
catch (Exception)
{
Console.WriteLine("Not a vaid input");
}
This will print "Not a vaid input", because one of the value is > 255.
Should you decide to allow an input string composed of contiguous values:
651016667979899112101 => "AeBCabcpe"
You could adopt this variation:
string vWord2 = "11065666797989911210110177";
int step = 2;
var result2 = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = 0; i < vWord2.Length; i += step)
{
if (int.TryParse(vWord2.Substring(i, step), out int n) && n < 127)
{
if (n <= 12 & i == 0) {
i = -3; step = 3; ;
}
else if(n <= 12 & i >= 2) {
step = 3; i -= step;
}
else {
result2.Append((char)n);
if (step == 3) ++i;
step = 2;
}
}
else {
Console.WriteLine($"{vWord2.Substring(i, step)} is not a vaid input");
break;
}
}
Console.WriteLine($"Result string: {result2.ToString()}");
Result string: nABCabcpeeM
As Tom Blodget requested, a note about the automatic conversion
between ASCII characters-set and Unicode CodePoints.
This code produces some ASCII characters using an integer value, corresponding to the character in the ASCII table, casting the value to a char type and converting the result to a Windows standard Unicode (UTF-16LE) string.
Why there's no need to explicitly convert the ASCII chars to their Unicode representation?
Because, for historical reasons, the lower Unicode CodePoints directly map to the standard ASCII table (the US-ASCII table).
Hence, no conversion is required, or it can be considered implicit.
But, since the .Net string type uses UTF-16LE Unicode internally (which uses a 16-bit unit for each character in the lower Plane, two 16-bit code units for CodePoints greater or equal to 216), the memory allocation in bytes for the string is double the number of characters.
In the .Net Reference Source, StringBuilder.ToString() will call the internal wstrcpy method:
wstrcpy(char *dmem, char *smem, int charCount)
which will then call Buffer.Memcpy:
Buffer.Memcpy((byte*)dmem, (byte*)smem, charCount * 2);
where the size in bytes is set to charCount * 2.
Since the first draft, in the '80s (when the first Universal Character Set (UCS) was developed), one of the primary objectives of the IEEE and the Unicode Consortium (the two main entities that were developing the standard) was to preserve the compatibility with the pre-existing 256 character-set widely used at the time.
Preserving the CodePoints definition, thus preserving compatibility over time, is a strict rule in the Unicode world. This concept and rules apply to all modern variable length Unicode encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-16LE, UTF-32 etc.) and to all CodePoints in the Basic Multilingual Plane (CodePoints in the ranges U+0000 to U+D7FF and U+E000 to U+FFFF).
On the other hand, there's no explicit guarantee that the same Local CodePage encoding (often referred to as ANSI Encoding) will produce the same result in two machines, even when the same System (and System version) is in use.
Some other notes about Localization and the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR)

You can break the problem down into two parts:
P1. You want to take a string input of space-separated numbers, and convert them to int values:
private static int[] NumbersFromString(string input)
{
var parts = input.Split(new string[] { " " }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
var values = new List<int>(parts.Length);
foreach (var part in parts)
{
int value;
if (!int.TryParse(part, out value))
{
throw new ArgumentException("One or more values in the input string are invalid.", "input");
}
values.Add(value);
}
return values.ToArray();
}
P2. You want to convert those numbers into character representations:
private static string AsciiCodesToString(int[] inputValues)
{
var builder = new StringBuilder();
foreach (var value in inputValues)
{
builder.Append((char)value);
}
return builder.ToString();
}
You can then call it something like this:
Console.WriteLine(AsciiCodesToString(NumbersFromString(input)));
Try it online

Conversion from Base 64 error

I'm trying to convert from a Base64 string. First I tried this:
string a = "BTQmJiI6JzFkZ2ZhY";
byte[] b = Convert.FromBase64String(a);
string c = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(b);
Then got the exception - System.FormatException was caught Message=Invalid length for a Base-64 char array.
So after googling,I tried this:
string a1 = "BTQmJiI6JzFkZ2ZhY";
int mod4 = a1.Length % 4;
if (mod4 > 0)
{
a1 += new string('=', 4 - mod4);
}
byte[] b1 = Convert.FromBase64String(a1);
string c1 = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(b1);
Here I got the exception - System.FormatException was caught Message=Invalid character in a Base-64 string.
Is there any invalid character in "BTQmJiI6JzFkZ2ZhY"? Or is it the length issue?
EDIT: I first decrypt the input string using the below code:
string sourstr, deststr,strchar;
int strlen;
decimal ascvalue, ConvValue;
deststr = "";
sourstr = "InputString";
strlen = sourstr.Length;
for (int intI = 0; intI <= strlen - 1; intI++)
{
strchar = sourstr.Substring(intI, 1);
ascvalue = (decimal)strchar[0];
ConvValue = (decimal)((int)ascvalue ^ 85);
if ((char)ConvValue.ToString().Length == 0)
{
deststr = deststr + strchar;
}
else
{
deststr = deststr + (char)ConvValue;
}
}
This output deststr is passed to below code
Convert.ToBase64String(System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(deststr));
This is where I got "BTQmJiI6JzFkZ2ZhY"

You cannot get such base64 string by encoding whole number of bytes. While encoding, every 3 bytes are represented as 4 characters, because 3 bytes is 24 bits, and each base64 character is 6 bits (2^6=64), so 4 of them is also 24 bits. If number of bytes to encode is not divisable by 3 - you have some bytes left. You can have 2 or 1 bytes left.
If you have 2 bytes left - that's 16 bits and you need at least 3 characters to encode that (2 characters is just 12 bits - not enough). So in case you have 2 bytes left - you encode them with 3 characters and apply "=" padding.
If you have 1 byte left - that's 8 bits. You need at least 2 characters for that. You encode to 2 characters and apply "==" padding.
Note that there is no way to encode something to just one character (and for that reason - there is no "===" padding).
Your string can be divided in 4 character blocks: "BTQm", "JiI6", "JzFk", "Z2Zh", "Y". 4 first blocks each represent 3 bytes, but what "Y" represents? Who knows. You can say that it represents 1 byte in range 0-63, but from above you can see that's not how it works, so to interpret it like that you have to do it yourself.
From above you can see that you cannot get base64 string with length 17 (without padding). You can get 16, 18, 19, 20, but never 17

Are you sure you took all chars from base64 output?
Appending "==" at the end of the string will make your first approach work without any problems. Although there is strange character at the beginning of the output. So the next question is: Are you sure it is "ASCI" Encoding?

Convert int32 to string in base 16

I'm currently trying to convert a .NET JSON Encoder to NETMF but have hit a problem with Convert.ToString() as there isn't such thing in NETMF.
The original line of the encoder looks like this:
Convert.ToString(codepoint, 16);
And after looking at the documentation for Convert.ToString(Int32, Int32) it says it's for converting an int32 into int 2, 8, 10 or 16 by providing the int as the first parameter and the base as the second.
What are some low level code of how to do this or how would I go about doing this?
As you can see from the code, I only need conversion from an Int32 to Int16.
EDIT
Ah, the encoder also then wants to do:
PadLeft(4, '0');
on the string, is this just adding 4 '0' + '0' + '0' + '0' to the start of the string?

If you mean you want to change a 32-bit integer value into a string which shows the value in hexadecimal:
string hex = intValue.ToString("x");
For variations, please see Stack Overflow question Convert a number into the hex value in .NET.
Disclaimer: I'm not sure if this function exists in NETMF, but it is so fundamental that I think it should.

Here’s some sample code for converting an integer to hexadecimal (base 16):
int num = 48764; // assign your number
// Generate hexadecimal number in reverse.
var sb = new StringBuilder();
do
{
sb.Append(hexChars[num & 15]);
num >>= 4;
}
while (num > 0);
// Pad with leading 0s for a minimum length of 4 characters.
while (sb.Length < 4)
sb.Append('0');
// Reverse string and get result.
char[] chars = new char[sb.Length];
sb.CopyTo(0, chars, 0, sb.Length);
Array.Reverse(chars);
string result = new string(chars);
PadLeft(4, '0') prepends leading 0s to the string to ensure a minimum length of 4 characters.
The hexChars value lookup may be trivially defined as a string:
internal static readonly string hexChars = "0123456789ABCDEF";
Edit: Replacing StringBuilder with List<char>:
// Generate hexadecimal number in reverse.
List<char> builder = new List<char>();
do
{
builder.Add(hexChars[num & 15]);
num >>= 4;
}
while (num > 0);
// Pad with leading 0s for a minimum length of 4 characters.
while (builder.Count < 4)
builder.Add('0');
// Reverse string and get result.
char[] chars = new char[builder.Count];
for (int i = 0; i < builder.Count; ++i)
chars[i] = builder[builder.Count - i - 1];
string result = new string(chars);
Note: Refer to the “Hexadecimal Number Output” section of Expert .NET Micro Framework for a discussion of this conversion.

Error "Hex string have a odd number of digits" while converting int->hex->binary in C#

Aim :
To convert a integer value first to hexstring and then to byte[].
Example :
Need to convert int:1024 to hexstring:400 to byte[]: 00000100 00000000
Method:
For converting from integer to hex string i tried below code
int i=1024;
string hexString = i.ToString("X");
i got hexstring value as "400". Then i tried converting hex string to byte[] using below code
byte[] value = HexStringToByteArray(hexValue);
/* function for converting hexstring to byte array */
public byte[] HexStringToByteArray(string hex)
{
int NumberChars = hex.Length;
if(NumberChars %2==1)
throw new Exception("Hex string cannot have an odd number of digits.");
byte[] bytes = new byte[NumberChars / 2];
for (int i = 0; i < NumberChars; i += 2)
bytes[i / 2] = Convert.ToByte(hex.Substring(i, 2), 16);
return bytes;
}
Error:
Here i got the exception "Hex String cannot have a odd number of digits"
Solution: ??

You can force the ToString to return a specific number of digits:
string hexString = i.ToString("X08");

The exception is thrown by your own code. You can make your code more flexible to accept hex strings that have an odd number of digits:
if (hex.Length % 2 == 1) hex = "0"+hex;
Now you can remove the odd/even check, and your code will be alright.

Your code throws the exception you're seeing:
throw new Exception("Hex string cannot have an odd number of digits.");
You can improve the conversion method to also accept odd hex string lengths like this:
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
// ...
public byte[] HexStringToByteArray(string hex)
{
var result = new List<byte>();
for (int i = hex.Length - 1; i >= 0; i -= 2)
{
if (i > 0)
{
result.Insert(0, Convert.ToByte(hex.Substring(i - 1, 2), 16));
}
else
{
result.Insert(0, Convert.ToByte(hex.Substring(i, 1), 16));
}
}
return bytes.ToArray();
}
This code should iterate through the hex string from its end, adding new bytes to the beginning of the resulting list (that will be transformed into an array before returning the value). If a single digit remains, it will be treated separately.

Your hex string has an odd number of digits and you are explicitly checking for that and throwing the exception. You need to decide why you put this line of code in there and whether you need to remove that in favour of other logic.
Other options are:
add a "0" to the beginning of the string to make it even length
force whoever is calling that code to always provide an even length string
change the later code to deal with odd numbers of characters properly...
In comments you have suggested that the first is what you need to know in which case:
if(hex.Length%2==1)
hex = "0"+hex;
Put this at the beginning of your method and if you get an odd number in then you will add the zero to it automatically. You can of course then take out your later check and exception throw.
Of note is that you may want to validate the input string as hex or possibly just put a try catch round the conversion to make sure that it is a valid hex string.
Also since it isn't clear whether the string is a necessary intermediate step or just one that you think is necessary, you might be interested in C# int to byte[] which deals with converting to bytes without the intermediate string.

Convert List<boolean> to String

I got a boolean list with 92 booleans, I want the list to be converted to a string, I thought I ll take 8 booleans(bits) and put them in a Byte(8 bits) and then use the ASCII to convert it the byte value to a char then add the chars to a string. However after googeling for more then 2 hours, no luck atm. I tried converting the List to a Byte list but it didn t work either ^^.
String strbyte = null;
for (int x = 0; x != tmpboolist.Count; x++) //tmpboolist is the 90+- boolean list
{
//this loop checks for true then puts a 1 or a 0 in the string(strbyte)
if (tmpboolist[x])
{
strbyte = strbyte + '1';
}
else
{
strbyte = strbyte + '0';
}
}
//here I try to convert the string to a byte list but no success
//no success because the testbytearray has the SAME size as the
//tmpboolist(but it should have less since 8 booleans should be 1 Byte)
//however all the 'Bytes' are 48 & 49 (which is 1 and 0 according to
//http://www.asciitable.com/)
Byte[] testbytearray = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(strbyte);
PS If anyone has a better suggestion on how to code & decode a Boolean list to a String?
(Because I want people to share their boolean list with a string rather then a list of 90 1 and 0s.)
EDIT: got it working now! ty all for helping
string text = new string(tmpboolist.Select(x => x ? '1' : '0').ToArray());
byte[] bytes = getBitwiseByteArray(text); //http://stackoverflow.com/a/6756231/1184013
String Arraycode = Convert.ToBase64String(bytes);
System.Windows.MessageBox.Show(Arraycode);
//first it makes a string out of the boolean list then it uses the converter to make it an Byte[](array), then we use the base64 encoding to make the byte[] a String.(that can be decoded later)
I ll look into the encoding32 later, ty for all the help again :)

You should store your boolean values in a BitArray.
var values = new BitArray(92);
values[0] = false;
values[1] = true;
values[2] = true;
...
Then you can convert the BitArray to a byte array
var bytes = new byte[(values.Length + 7) / 8];
values.CopyTo(bytes);
and the byte array to a Base64 string
var result = Convert.ToBase64String(bytes);
Reversely, you can convert a Base64 string to a byte array
var bytes2 = Convert.FromBase64String(result);
and the byte array to a BitArray
var values2 = new BitArray(bytes2);
The Base64 string looks like this: "Liwd7bRv6TMY2cNE". This is probably a bit unhandy for sharing between people; have a look at human-oriented base-32 encoding:
Anticipated uses of these [base-32 strings] include cut-
and-paste, text editing (e.g. in HTML files), manual transcription via a
keyboard, manual transcription via pen-and-paper, vocal transcription over
phone or radio, etc.
The desiderata for such an encoding are:
minimizing transcription errors -- e.g. the well-known problem of confusing
'0' with 'O'
embedding into other structures -- e.g. search engines, structured or
marked-up text, file systems, command shells
brevity -- Shorter [strings] are better than longer ones.
ergonomics -- Human users (especially non-technical ones) should find the
[strings] as easy and pleasant as possible. The uglier the [strings] looks, the worse.

To start with, it's a bad idea to concatenate strings in a loop like that - at least use StringBuilder, or use something like this with LINQ:
string text = new string(tmpboolist.Select(x => x ? '1' : '0').ToArray());
But converting your string to a List<bool> is easy with LINQ, using the fact that string implements IEnumerable<char>:
List<bool> values = text.Select(c => c == '1').ToList();
It's not clear where the byte array comes in... but you should not try to represent arbitrary binary data in a string just using Encoding.GetString. That's not what it's for.
If you don't care what format your string uses, then using Base64 will work well - but be aware that if you're grouping your Boolean values into bytes, you'll need extra information if you need to distinguish between "7 values" and "8 values, the first of which is False" for example.

Since I am infering from your code you want a string with n digits of either 1 or 0 depending onthe internal lists bool value then how about...
public override string ToString()
{
StringBuilder output = new StringBuilder(91);
foreach(bool item in this.tempboolist)
{
output.Append(item ? "1" : "0");
}
return output.ToString();
}
Warning this was off the cuff typing, I have not validated this with a compiler yet!

This function does what you want:
public String convertBArrayToStr(bool[] input)
{
if (input == null)
return "";
int length = input.Count();
int byteArrayCount = (input.Count() - 1) / 8 + 1;
var bytes = new char[byteArrayCount];
for (int i = 0; i < length; i++ )
{
var mappedIndex = (i - 1) / 8;
bytes[mappedIndex] = (char)(2 * bytes[mappedIndex] +(input[i] == true ? 1 : 0));
}
return new string(bytes);
}