base64 and UTF-8 encoding issue

Question

Hello everyone,

I am writing a simple web method which returns byte[], and the byte[] is encoded by UTF-8. I have investigated related WSDL and soap message, seems the underlying web services stack will use base64 encoding?

For various reasons, I can not use or re-encode my return byte[] from UTF-8 to base64. Any ideas to modify the base64 encoding to UTF-8 encoding?

Here is my related web methods, SOAP message and related type in WSDL

Web service server side code

        [WebMethod]
        public byte[] HelloWorld2()
        {
            return utf8encodedbytes;
        }

SOAP response

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"&gt;
  <soap:Body>
    <HelloWorld2Response xmlns="http://tempuri.org/"&gt;
      <HelloWorld2Result>base64Binary</HelloWorld2Result>
    </HelloWorld2Response>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>

related type in WSDL

xsd:base64Binary

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

Your question doesn't really make a lot of sense I'm afraid - byte arrays aren't encoded with text encodings like UTF-8. You normally apply a UTF-8 encoding to text to get a byte array. To transfer arbitrary byte arrays in XML you should then use base64.

If you want to transfer text you should just return a string to start with.

What is the original data, before any kind of encoding happens? If it's a byte array, you should return a byte array and the XML should automatically contain base64-encoded data. If it's text, you should return a string and let XML cope with the encoding.

Answer 2

So what's stopping you from using Convert.ToBase64() and Convert.FromBase64()? These functions do exactly that: converting byte array to base64 strings and vica versa.