Accelerated C# 2008

CHAPTER 8 ■ WORKING WITH STRINGS208

Working with Strings from Outside Sources

Within the confines of the .NET Framework, all strings are represented using Unicode UTF-16 char-

acter arrays. However, you often might need to interface with the outside world using some other

form of encoding, such as UTF-8. Sometimes, even when interfacing with other entities that use 16-

bit Unicode strings, those entities may use big-endian Unicode strings, whereas the Intel platform

typically uses little-endian Unicode strings. The .NET Framework makes this conversion work easy

with the System.Text.Encoding class.

In this section, I won’t go into all of the details ...