Convert string to base64 string

-
A while back I came across the need to convert regular string text into a base64 string. .Net makes this fairly easy to do. I created a public static class and added two public static methods to encode/decode strings. Now they don't have to be static or public but I tend to make helper/utility classes that way. All of the classes being used are in the System and System.Text namespaces.


/// <summary>
/// Encodes the string to Base64.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="valueToEndcode">The value to endcode.</param>
/// <returns>A base64 encoded string.</returns>
public static string EncodeStringToBase64( string valueToEndcode )
{
   // encode the string into ascii byte array
   byte[] toEncodeAsBytes = ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetBytes( valueToEndcode );

   // use the byte array to encode to a base64 string
   string returnValue = Convert.ToBase64String( toEncodeAsBytes );

   // drop back the new encoded string value
   return returnValue;

}

/// <summary>
/// Decodes the string from Base64.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="encodedData">The encoded data.</param>
/// <returns>An Ascii encoded string.</returns>
static public string DecodeStringFromBase64( string encodedData )
{
   // get a byte array from the encoded data
   byte[] encodedDataAsBytes = Convert.FromBase64String( encodedData );

   // turn the byte array into ascii data
   string returnValue = ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetString( encodedDataAsBytes );

   // drop back the new decoded string
   return returnValue;
}



Now for my situation I only need to worry about ascii encoded strings. If you're worried about needing a different encoding it would be trivial to swap out the ASCIIEncoding class for a different encoding class or to simply pass the desired encoding into the functions themselves.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Javascript numeric only text box

-
So working on an asp.net page I found I needed a numeric only text box that allowed numbers from 0-100 with no decimals. I found a range validator would do most of the work but I wanted to keep users from typing in bad values. So after some searching I found javascript has a good solution. I like whitespace so shrink if you're one of those white space freaks. Update: someone was kind enough to point out an error in my JS! So I went through and made sure it works. And it did need a minor tweak to be correct. So thanks to the poster the corrected script and usage are below. Update Again: This is the new and improved function to allow for the tab key to tab out of the text box. IE allows this by default however Firefox really tightens down the text box and doesn't allow anything you don't specify. So I had to add the tab key press. I also cleaned up the code so it isn't a huge chunk of if blocks and is now much more succinct. Please feel free to test and us...
Read more

String.Replace vs Regex.Replace

-
Image
I recently ran into a situation where I had to do some string manipulation. I had to replace some bad text with valid text. All this had to do with creating valid xml element names. So we had to string white space and some other invalid characters and replace them with valid xml element formatting. To do this we ended up using the Regex.Replace static method. Simply because there was some complexity involved that would have entailed using more then 1 String.Replace call when we can do it all with one regular expression. This caused some discussion about how heavy the regex class is and when to use it. I decided to do some testing and these are my results. First the code static void Main( string[] args ) { // this is our test value string testValue = "This is a test string"; int count; // run the regex replace DateTime regexStart = DateTime.Now; for( count = 0; count < 10000000; count++ ) { string newValue = Regex.Replace( testValue, ...
Read more

Notify Icon Text vs BalloonTipText

-
Ok so I have a small application that shows a users ip address via a tool tip when it sits in their system tray. Everything is going fine until someone sends me a bug that there was a problem. Investigating this I find that the method I was using to display tool tips in the system menu is somewhat flawed. I was using a notify icon control to show the tool tips while in the system tray. This works but I was setting the Text property of the control like this: // old way of setting text, with 64 character limit this.notifyIcon1.Text = "Show me in the toolbar"; This works but only for up to 64 characters. When I was designing the application I was thinking about ip addresses using the v4 format not the v6 format. Sure enough v6 ip addresses kick out more then 64 characters a lot of the time. So the search was on and I found using the balloon text can show more data but is a wee bit harder to use. Balloon tool tips don't show automatically like the text does. You h...
Read more