How to GetBytes() in C# with UTF8 encoding with BOM?

Solution 1:

Try like this:

public ActionResult Download()
{
    var data = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes("some data");
    var result = Encoding.UTF8.GetPreamble().Concat(data).ToArray();
    return File(result, "application/csv", "foo.csv");
}

The reason is that the UTF8Encoding constructor that takes a boolean parameter doesn't do what you would expect:

byte[] bytes = new UTF8Encoding(true).GetBytes("a");

The resulting array would contain a single byte with the value of 97. There's no BOM because UTF8 doesn't require a BOM.

Solution 2:

I created a simple extension to convert any string in any encoding to its representation of byte array when it is written to a file or stream:

public static class StreamExtensions
{
    public static byte[] ToBytes(this string value, Encoding encoding)
    {
        using (var stream = new MemoryStream())
        using (var sw = new StreamWriter(stream, encoding))
        {
            sw.Write(value);
            sw.Flush();
            return stream.ToArray();
        }
    }
}

Usage:

stringValue.ToBytes(Encoding.UTF8)

This will work also for other encodings like UTF-16 which requires the BOM.