Converting strings

PowerShell has a variety of commands that can convert strings. These are explained in the following sections.

Working with Base64

Base64 is a transport encoding that is used to represent binary data and therefore any (relatively simple) data type.

Base64 is particularly useful when storing complex strings in files, or in text-based transport protocols such as SMTP.

The .NET class System.Convert contains static methods that can be used to work with base64:

• ToBase64String
• FromBase64String

Two further methods exist to work with character arrays, these are not discussed here.

The ToBase64String method takes an array of bytes and converts it into a string. For example, a simple byte array may be converted:

PS> [Byte[]]$bytes = 97, 98, 99, 100, 101
[Convert]::ToBase64String($bytes)

YWJjZGU=

A more meaningful byte sequence can be made from a few words by getting the byte values for each character:

PS> $bytes = [System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes('Hello world')
[Convert]::ToBase64String...