Convert bytes32 to bytes

Question

Is there a simple way to convert bytes32 to bytes in Solidity?

I'm trying to get the length of the string passed in the bytes32 variable but everything gets returned 32 size which makes sense.

But explicit conversion does not seem to work:

bytes memory _tmpUsername = bytes(_username);  // _username is of type bytes32 

This throws an error of:

Explicit type conversion not allowed from "bytes32" to "bytes storage pointer"

Answer 1

Since solidity@0.4.22, you can use abi.encodePacked() for this, which returns bytes. For example ;

contract C { 
  function toBytes(bytes32 _data) public pure returns (bytes) {
    return abi.encodePacked(_data);
  }
}

Answer 2

Here is a totally inefficient method of converting bytes32 to bytes (while removing extra zeros bytes to the right).

function bytes32ToBytes(bytes32 data) internal pure returns (bytes) {
    uint i = 0;
    while (i < 32 && uint(data[i]) != 0) {
        ++i;
    }
    bytes memory result = new bytes(i);
    i = 0;
    while (i < 32 && data[i] != 0) {
        result[i] = data[i];
        ++i;
    }
    return result;
}