How to: Convert an Array of Bytes into a String in Visual Basic

This topic shows how to convert the bytes from a byte array into a string.

Example

This example uses the GetString method of the Encoding.Unicode encoding class to convert all the bytes from a byte array into a string.

Private Function UnicodeBytesToString(
    ByVal bytes() As Byte) As String

    Return System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetString(bytes)
End Function

You can choose from several encoding options to convert a byte array into a string:

Encoding.ASCII: Gets an encoding for the ASCII (7-bit) character set.
Encoding.BigEndianUnicode: Gets an encoding for the UTF-16 format using the big-endian byte order.
Encoding.Default: Gets an encoding for the system's current ANSI code page.
Encoding.Unicode: Gets an encoding for the UTF-16 format using the little-endian byte order.
Encoding.UTF32: Gets an encoding for the UTF-32 format using the little-endian byte order.
Encoding.UTF7: Gets an encoding for the UTF-7 format.
Encoding.UTF8: Gets an encoding for the UTF-8 format.