c#, Textbox.Text encoding

Question

Hi!

I have code:

string text = sampleTextBox.Text;

and I'm wondering in what encoding text is? Is it utf16 (as it is string) or maybe it is my operating system encoding?

Answer 1

It's all Unicode, basically - there's no conversion between the .NET textual types (char/string) and binary going on, so there's no encoding to worry about.

You potentially need to worry about surrogate pairs to get from the UTF-16 textual representation of char and string to full UTF-32, but that's slightly different to the normal encoding issues.

Philosophically, a textbox contains text, not binary data. You should only be thinking about encodings when there's a conversion to a binary format - such as a file.

Answer 2

String variables in .Net are UTF-16 internally. Encoding comes into play when you want to output the string outside your program: a file, a webpage, or over the network in some fashion.