How to convert UTF-8 byte[] to string

string result = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(byteArray);

I saw some answers at this post and it's possible to be considered completed base knowledge, because I have a several approaches in C# Programming to resolve the same problem. The only thing that is necessary to be considered is about a difference between pure UTF-8 and UTF-8 with a BOM.

Last week, at my job, I needed to develop one functionality that outputs CSV files with a BOM and other CSV files with pure UTF-8 (without a BOM). Each CSV file encoding type will be consumed by different non-standardized APIs. One API reads UTF-8 with a BOM and the other API reads without a BOM. I needed to research the references about this concept, reading the "What's the difference between UTF-8 and UTF-8 without BOM?" Stack Overflow question, and the Wikipedia article "Byte order mark" to build my approach.

Finally, my C# Programming for both UTF-8 encoding types (with BOM and pure) needed to be similar to this example below:

// For UTF-8 with BOM, equals shared by Zanoni (at top)
string result = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(byteArray);

//for Pure UTF-8 (without B.O.M.)
string result = (new UTF8Encoding(false)).GetString(byteArray);

In addition to the selected answer, if you're using .NET 3.5 or .NET 3.5 CE, you have to specify the index of the first byte to decode, and the number of bytes to decode:

string result = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(byteArray, 0, byteArray.Length);

Try this console application:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    //Encoding _UTF8 = Encoding.UTF8;
    string[] _mainString = { "Hello, World!" };
    Console.WriteLine("Main String: " + _mainString);

    // Convert a string to UTF-8 bytes.
    byte[] _utf8Bytes = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(_mainString[0]);

    // Convert UTF-8 bytes to a string.
    string _stringuUnicode = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(_utf8Bytes);
    Console.WriteLine("String Unicode: " + _stringuUnicode);
}

Here is a result where you didn’t have to bother with encoding. I used it in my network class and send binary objects as string with it.

public static byte[] String2ByteArray(string str)
{
    char[] chars = str.ToArray();
    byte[] bytes = new byte[chars.Length * 2];

    for (int i = 0; i < chars.Length; i++)
        Array.Copy(BitConverter.GetBytes(chars[i]), 0, bytes, i * 2, 2);

    return bytes;
}

public static string ByteArray2String(byte[] bytes)
{
    char[] chars = new char[bytes.Length / 2];

    for (int i = 0; i < chars.Length; i++)
        chars[i] = BitConverter.ToChar(bytes, i * 2);

    return new string(chars);
}

string result = ASCIIEncoding.UTF8.GetString(byteArray);