How do I serialize a System.Windows.Media.Color object to an sRGB string?

Question

I need to serialize a color used in a WPF application to a database. I'd like to use the sRGB values, because they're more familiar to those of us that have spent the last few years doing web development.

How can a get an ARGB string (like #FFFFFFFF) from a System.Windows.Media.Color object?

UPDATE: I was misled by the documentation on MSDN. As @Kris noted below, the documentation for the ToString() method is incorrect. Although it says that ToString() "creates a string representation of the color using the ScRGB channels", it will actually return a string in ARGB hex format if the color was created using the FromARGB() method. It's an undocumented feature, I suppose.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms606572.aspx

Answer 1

You can get the A, R, G and B values from a Color instance as bytes, so you just need to convert the bytes to hex and concatenate the hex values as strings.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/623104/c-byte-to-hex-string

Answer 2

you can get the HTML color string (and back) like this

System.Drawing.Color c = System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.FromHtml("#F5F7F8");
String strHtmlColor = System.Drawing.ColorTranslator.ToHtml(c);

here is the MSDN documentation. I should probably not that these are GDI colors, and not WPF, so might not be much help.

Answer 3

If you create your colors using either Color.FromRgb or Color.FromArgb instead of FromScRgb you should get a hex string result from ToString.

If you want to do it manually

string.Format("#{0:X2}{1:X2}{2:X2}{3:X2}", c.A, c.R, c.G, c.B);

You can use int.Parse(,NumberStyles.HexNumber) to go the other way.

Note sRGB and scRGB refer to different color spaces, make sure your using the one you want.