XOR bytes in c#

Question

I saw a neat way to swap 2 variables using XOR lately and decided to try that in c# with strings, and though I managed to do that I'm a little worried that I have to cast int into byte after the XOR operation. Here's the code:

var string1 = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("Hello world1!");
var string2 = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("Hello world2!");

for (var i = 0; i < string1.Length; i++)
{
    string1[i] = (byte)(string1[i] ^ string2[i]);
}

for (var i = 0; i < string2.Length; i++)
{
    string2[i] = (byte)(string1[i] ^ string2[i]);
}

for (var i = 0; i < string1.Length; i++)
{
    string1[i] = (byte)(string2[i] ^ string1[i]);
}

Console.WriteLine(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(string1));
Console.WriteLine(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(string2));

Is there any better way of doing this? And while we are at it, what actually happens when you cast primitives in C#? Is there any new memory being allocated for it?

Answer 1

With the introduction of tuples in C#, the xor trick is actually no longer as neat as it used to be:

 var string1 = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("Hello world1!");
 var string2 = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes("Hello world2!");

 (string1, string2) = (string2, string1);

 Console.WriteLine(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(string1));
 Console.WriteLine(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(string2));

The tuple syntax is explained here.