How to use string for TcpClient in C# instead of byte?

Question

In C# I try to send a string through TcpClient as such:

byte[] outputOutStream = new byte[1024];
ASCIIEncoding outputAsciiEncoder
string message //This is the message I want to send
TcpClient outputClient = TcpClient(ip, port); 
Stream outputDataStreamWriter   

outputDataStreamWriter = outputClient.GetStream();
outputOutStream = outputAsciiEncoder.GetBytes(message);
outputDataStreamWriter.Write(outputOutStream, 0, outputOutStream.Length);

I must to convert message from string to bytes, is there a way I can send it directly as string?

I know this is possible in Java.

Jon Skeet · Accepted Answer · 2014-05-13 17:10:10Z

10

Create a StreamWriter on top of outputClient.GetStream:

StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(outputClient.GetStream(),
                                       Encoding.ASCII);
writer.Write(message);

(You may want a using statement to close the writer automatically, and you should also carefully consider which encoding you want to use. Are you sure you want to limit yourself to ASCII? If you control both sides of the connection so can pick an arbitrary encoding, then UTF-8 is usually a good bet.)

edited May 13, 2014 at 17:10

answered Feb 3, 2009 at 16:57

Jon Skeet

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4 Comments

Andrew Rollings Over a year ago

Would he need to encode the length of the string as part of the stream too, or is that handled automagically?

Jon Skeet Over a year ago

The stream of data doesn't contain the length of the string. If he wants to do that, BinaryWriter would probably be a better bet. It will depend on the protocol, basically.

Joseph Lennox Over a year ago

Encoding.UTF8 is likely a safer bet unless you know the other end is explicitly ASCII, double so if you're working on HTTP.

Jon Skeet Over a year ago

@JosephLennox: I only used ASCII on the grounds that the OP did too. Guessing at any encoding is a bad idea; you should know exactly which encoding both sides are meant to use. I'll add a suggestion for UTF-8 in the answer though.

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