How Do You Convert a Byte Array to a Hexadecimal String, and Vice Versa?

How can you convert a byte array to a hexadecimal string, and vice versa?

1

52 Answers

You can use Convert.ToHexString starting with .NET 5.
There's also a method for the reverse operation: Convert.FromHexString.


For older versions of .NET you can either use:

public static string ByteArrayToString(byte[] ba)
{
  StringBuilder hex = new StringBuilder(ba.Length * 2);
  foreach (byte b in ba)
    hex.AppendFormat("{0:x2}", b);
  return hex.ToString();
}

or:

public static string ByteArrayToString(byte[] ba)
{
  return BitConverter.ToString(ba).Replace("-","");
}

There are even more variants of doing it, for example here.

The reverse conversion would go like this:

public static byte[] StringToByteArray(String hex)
{
  int NumberChars = hex.Length;
  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;
}

Using Substring is the best option in combination with Convert.ToByte. See this answer for more information. If you need better performance, you must avoid Convert.ToByte before you can drop SubString.

19

Performance Analysis

Note: new leader as of 2015-08-20.

I ran each of the various conversion methods through some crude Stopwatch performance testing, a run with a random sentence (n=61, 1000 iterations) and a run with a Project Gutenburg text (n=1,238,957, 150 iterations). Here are the results, roughly from fastest to slowest. All measurements are in ticks (10,000 ticks = 1 ms) and all relative notes are compared to the [slowest] StringBuilder implementation. For the code used, see below or the test framework repo where I now maintain the code for running this.

Robert Thorne

Robert Thorne

Automotive & Future Transportation Editor

Robert Thorne covers electric vehicle innovations, autonomous driving systems, global mobility trends, and automotive engineering developments.