Getting null terminated string from System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetString

Question

I have an array of bytes that I receive from an external entity. It is a fixed size. The bytes contain a unicode string, with 0 values to pad out the rest of the buffer:

So the bytes might be:

H \0 E \0 L \0 L \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 ... etc 

I'm getting that buffer and converting it to a string like so:

byte[] buffer = new byte[buffSize];
m_dataStream.Read(buffer, 0, buffSize);
String cmd = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetString(buffer);

What I get back is a string that looks like this:

"HELLO\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0..."

How can I tell GetString to terminate the string at the first Unicode null (ie so I just get back "HELLO")?

Thanks for any input.

Answer 1

If you're sure the rest is all \0, this would work:

cmd = cmd.TrimEnd('\0');

Otherwise, if you just want to get everything before the first null:

int index = cmd.IndexOf('\0');
if (index >= 0)
   cmd = cmd.Remove(index);

Note that Unicode.GetString will take care of double \0s. You should just look for a single \0.