How do I get a consistent byte representation of strings?

Mar 15 2018 1:53 AM
How do I convert a String to a byte in .NET (C#) without manually specifying a specific encoding?
 
I'm going to encrypt the string. I can encrypt it without converting, but I'd still like to know why encoding comes to play here.
 
Also, why should encoding be taken into consideration? Can't I simply get what bytes the string has been stored in? Why is there a dependency on character encodings?

Answers (2)