Those are two different goals: 1) serialize a general-case string; which can be done using
System.Text.Encoding, and the result depends on the encoding used; if the encoding represents one of Unicode UTFs, all results will be different but equivalent, and the failure to use UTF can lead to data loss (think '????' characters); 2) serialization of a number represented by a string.
In the second case, it has nothing to do with
string. You should work with data, not with the strings representing data. The strings can be used only for presentation of data in UI, human-readable files and the like.
Anyway, you can parse a string to any numeric type using their
Parse or
TryParse methods. For example:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.uint32.parse.aspx[
^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.uint32.tryparse.aspx[
^].
(Please see other numeric types you might need.)
And then, you can serialize numeric value to array of bytes — and back. Please see the class
System.BitConverter:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.bitconverter.aspx[
^].
—SA
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