title: How do I get a consistent byte representation of strings in C# without manually specifying an encoding?
body: <p>How do I convert a <code>string</code> to a <code>byte[]</code> in .NET (C#) without manually specifying a specific encoding?</p>
  
  <p>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.</p>
  
  <p>Also, why should encoding even 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?</p>