Redis keys are binary safe. I'd like to mess around and put binary into redis using C#. My client of choice doesn't support writing binary keys it uses keys and it make sense. However i am just fooling around so tell me how i can do this.

How do i convert a raw byte[] into a string? At first i was thinking about converting a byte[] to a utf8 string however unicode has some checks to see if its valid or not. So raw binary should fail.

Actually i tried it out. Instead of failing i got a strange result. My main question is how do i convert a raw byte[] to the equivalent string? My unimportant question is why did i get a 512 byte string instead of an exception saying this is not a valid UTF8 string?

code

var rainbow = new byte[256];
for (int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
{
    rainbow[i] = (byte)i;
}
var sz = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(rainbow);
var szarr = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(sz);
Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} {2}", ByteArraysEqual(szarr, rainbow), szarr.Length, rainbow.Length);

Output

False 512 256