Cannot implicitly convert type string to byte[]

Question

I have a class that encrypts a password with a salted hash.

But If I want to pass a null to the class I get the following error: Cannot implicitly convert type string to byte[]

Here is the class code:

public class MyHash
{
    public static string ComputeHash(string plainText, 
                            string hashAlgorithm, byte[] saltBytes)
    {
        Hash Code
    }
}

When I use the class I get the error: "Cannot implicitly convert type string to byte[]"

//Encrypt Password
byte[] NoHash = null;
byte[] encds = MyHash.ComputeHash(Password, "SHA256", NoHash);

Are strings supposed to be convertible to byte[]?

K-ballo
– K-ballo

2012-05-29 02:08:52 +00:00
Commented May 29, 2012 at 2:08 — K-ballo
– K-ballo, Commented May 29, 2012 at 2:08

RJ Lohan · Accepted Answer · 2012-05-29 02:09:34Z

15

This is because your 'ComputeHash' method returns a string, and you are trying to assign this return value to a byte array with;

byte[] encds = MyHash.ComputeHash(Password, "SHA256", NoHash);

There is no implicit converstion for string to byte[] because there exist a number of different encodings to represent a string as bytes, such as ASCII or UTF8.

You need to explicitly convert the bytes using an appropriate encoding class like so;

string x = "somestring";
byte[] y = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(x);

answered May 29, 2012 at 2:09

RJ Lohan

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Comments

Azeem · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-01 07:47:14Z

0

The return type of your ComputeHash function is a string. You try to assign the result of your function to encds, which is byte[]. The compiler points this discrepancy out to you, because there is no implicit conversion from string to byte[].

edited Mar 1, 2019 at 7:47

Azeem

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answered May 29, 2012 at 2:09

Reinier Torenbeek

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