generate strings for bulk insert of varbinary data from byte[]

Question

I would like to generate the (hex?) string representation of a C# byte[] of some object to be able to bulk imported into a varbinary field. When I use:

System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(X);

I am getting strings that look like this:

????N4?V?tw?c??*???9

rather than what I see when I do a select statement:

0x016C9562F6C8ACE9B25F12788E571C0CA04C2C1F4F7353F849E8199471DB18DC

Of course, this might just be a text editor issue.

Any ideas what to use in C# to be able to generate strings for bulk importing the string representation of the data into varbinary fields?

Answer 1

There's already several answers like this on getting HEX from a string, in your case, you mention that your original value is a Byte[] and here's some test:

assuming:

var s = "helloWorld";
var sB = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s);

you will get 00680065006C006C006F0057006F0072006C0064 using

string.Join("", sB.Select(c => String.Format("{0:X4}", Convert.ToInt32(c))));

or 68656C6C6F576F726C64 using

string.Join("", sB.Select(c => String.Format("{0:X2}", Convert.ToInt32(c))));

several other answers let you convert the HEX into String again, if you ever need it...