Save on typing while using UTF8 encoding

Question

Typing in something like Encoding.UTF8.GetString(...) and Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(...) everywhere in your code could be eliminated by a helper UTF8 type:

public class UTF8_Should
{
 [Test]
 public void Convert()
 {
 var text = "Hello World";
 byte[] array = (UTF8)text;
 string copy = (UTF8)array;
 Assert.AreEqual(text, copy);
 }
}

Where:

struct UTF8
{
 public static implicit operator UTF8(byte[] array) => new UTF8(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(array));
 public static implicit operator string(UTF8 utf8) => utf8.Text;
 public static implicit operator UTF8(string text) => new UTF8(text);
 public static implicit operator byte[](UTF8 utf8) => Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(utf8.Text);
 public UTF8(string text) => Text = text;
 string Text { get; }
}

Answer 1

You don't care about null references?

---

IMO you create an object in order just to do something, that is more suitable for the concept of extensions:

 public static class StringExtensions
 {
 public static byte[] ToUTF8Bytes(this string text)
 {
 return Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(text);
 }
 public static string ToUTF8(this byte[] bytes)
 {
 return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes);
 }
 }
 Assert.AreEqual(text, text.ToUTF8Bytes().ToUTF8());

The benefit of the extension methods is that you don't have to remember that you've created the UTF8 struct somewhere, because it will show up in the intellisence.

• Dmitry Nogin: 1) C# 8 supports non nullable references. 2) We will lost a possibility to declare parameters of type UTF8 which makes sense to have in, for example, IoT domain - you might would like to know how the string is about to be serialized.