Contrary to the answers here, you DON'T need to worry about encoding if the bytes don't need to be interpreted!
Like you mentioned, your goal is, simply, to "get what bytes the string has been stored in".
(And, of course, to be able to re-construct the string from the bytes.)
For those goals, I honestly do not understand why people keep telling you that you need the encodings. You certainly do NOT need to worry about encodings for this.
Just do this instead:
static byte[] GetBytes(string str)
{
byte[] bytes = new byte[str.Length * sizeof(char)];
System.Buffer.BlockCopy(str.ToCharArray(), 0, bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
return bytes;
}
// Do NOT use on arbitrary bytes; only use on GetBytes's output on the SAME system
static string GetString(byte[] bytes)
{
char[] chars = new char[bytes.Length / sizeof(char)];
System.Buffer.BlockCopy(bytes, 0, chars, 0, bytes.Length);
return new string(chars);
}
As long as your program (or other programs) don't try to interpret the bytes somehow, which you obviously didn't mention you intend to do, then there is nothing wrong with this approach! Worrying about encodings just makes your life more complicated for no real reason.
Additional benefit to this approach: It doesn't matter if the string contains invalid characters, because you can still get the data and reconstruct the original string anyway!
It will be encoded and decoded just the same, because you are just looking at the bytes.
If you used a specific encoding, though, it would've given you trouble with encoding/decoding invalid characters.
The simplest way is an anonymous method passed into Label.Invoke:
// Running on the worker thread
string newText = "abc";
form.Label.Invoke((MethodInvoker)delegate {
// Running on the UI thread
form.Label.Text = newText;
});
// Back on the worker thread
Notice that Invoke blocks execution until it completes--this is synchronous code. The question doesn't ask about asynchronous code, but there is lots of content on Stack Overflow about writing asynchronous code when you want to learn about it.
Best Answer
I you are doing localization the same way as I am, you just go into the Properties directory of your project and open the Resources.resx file in a text editor. In that, the strings are in XML nodes that look like this;
Once you get them translated, they go into similarly named files like Resources.fr.resx for French.
You can also open Resources.resx in Visual Studio, select Strings and copy/paste into Excel.
Or, by your description, you might be doing localization on a per form basis. In that case, the above applies, except that it is the Resx file for your form that you are interested in.