UnityEngine.PlayerPrefs corrupts string?

Question

I need to use PlayerPrefs to store arrays of bytes for my game. For some reason, the string I save with PlayerPrefs doesn't come out with the same length.

I.e.

byte[] TestArray = new byte[256];
for (byte i = 0; i < 256; i++)
{
    TestArray[i] = i;
}

char[] charBuffer = new char[TestArray.Length];
for (int i = 0; i < TestArray.Length; i++)
{ 
    charBuffer[i] = (char)TestArray[i];
}

PlayerPrefs.SetString ("Storage", new string(charBuffer));

PlayerPrefs.Save ();

Debug.Log (new String(charBuffer).Length);
Debug.Log (PlayerPrefs.GetString ("Storage").Length);

Log:

256
5

Is this possibly an issue with encoding? How do I fix it?

Answer 1

I browsed the UForums and found a solution. It turns out, Unity serializes strings in base64 so to save/extract data to/from a string, one has to save the data in that encoding. I'm not too keen on this subject, but this is what I did to make it work:

byte[] TestArray = new byte[256];
for (byte i = 0; i < 256; i++)
{
    TestArray[i] = i;
}

PlayerPrefs.SetString ("Storage", System.Convert.ToBase64String (TestArray));

PlayerPrefs.Save ();

Debug.Log (System.Convert.ToBase64String (TestArray).Length);
Debug.Log (PlayerPrefs.GetString ("Storage").Length);

Log:

256
256

Answer 2

Could just be lazy and convert to hex if the bin is not too large. Best way to deal with encoding issues is to skip them.