Convert IByteBuffer to String in C#

I am working on existing project which is built using DotNetty library, mostly networking framework. I am not that much aware with this framework but as a quick fix, I want to convert IByteBuffer value to the String.

IByteBuffer represents a stream of binary data of various data types, not a string.

If you want a dump of all the bytes in the buffer, you can use ByteBufferUtil.HexDump. This gives you a string of the individual bytes in hexadecimal. This is useful for troubleshooting, if the buffer doesn't contain quite the data you are expecting - you can go tracing the data byte by byte, and find where it goes wrong.

If you want to interpret the bytes differently, you really need to know the types in the buffer. There's no generic method, because the buffer isn't self-descriptive (unlike e.g. XML). If you're trying to get a quick look at the string data in the buffer, and the data happens to be encoded in ASCII, you can try something like this:

Encoding.ASCII.GetString(byteBuffer.Array)

Needless to say, unless the whole buffer contains an ASCII string, this will produce lots of garbage. Whether this is useful or not depends entirely on the data you're working with; if the buffer has something like an HTTP request, you'll probably see the data just fine. Needless to say, this should only be used for debugging purposes - for any production use, you should really know the layout of the buffer explicitly, rather than guessing at it.