C#: Converting byte array to string and printing out to console

It's actually:

    Console.WriteLine(Encoding.Default.GetString(value));

or for UTF-8 specifically:

    Console.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(value));

I was in a predicament where I had a signed byte array (sbyte[]) as input to a Test class and I wanted to replace it with a normal byte array (byte[]) for simplicity. I arrived here from a Google search but Tom's answer wasn't useful to me.

I wrote a helper method to print out the initializer of a given byte[]:

public void PrintByteArray(byte[] bytes)
{
    var sb = new StringBuilder("new byte[] { ");
    foreach (var b in bytes)
    {
        sb.Append(b + ", ");
    }
    sb.Append("}");
    Console.WriteLine(sb.ToString());
}

You can use it like this:

var signedBytes = new sbyte[] { 1, 2, 3, -1, -2, -3, 127, -128, 0, };
var unsignedBytes = UnsignedBytesFromSignedBytes(signedBytes);
PrintByteArray(unsignedBytes);
// output:
// new byte[] { 1, 2, 3, 255, 254, 253, 127, 128, 0, }

The ouput is valid C# which can then just be copied into your code.

And just for completeness, here is the UnsignedBytesFromSignedBytes method:

// http://stackoverflow.com/a/829994/346561
public static byte[] UnsignedBytesFromSignedBytes(sbyte[] signed)
{
    var unsigned = new byte[signed.Length];
    Buffer.BlockCopy(signed, 0, unsigned, 0, signed.Length);
    return unsigned;
}

I've used this simple code in my codebase:

static public string ToReadableByteArray(byte[] bytes)
{
    return string.Join(", ", bytes);
}

To use:

Console.WriteLine(ToReadableByteArray(bytes));