SerialPort encoding - how do I get 8 bit ASCII?

Question

I\'m having a problem with a program that communicates over a serial port. One of the characters it must send and receive is the degree symbol, ASCII 0xBF. It\'s been working fi

Answer 1

The degree symbol in both 1252 and 28591 appears to be xB0, not xBF.

Answer 2

System.Text.ASCIIEncoding isn't the right encoding to use for 8-bit communication. Instead use e.g. the "ISO 8859-1 Latin 1; Western European (ISO)" code page:

port.Encoding = Encoding.GetEncoding(28591);

Answer 3

Your problem is that ASCIIEncoding is a 7 bit encoding. You're looking for something that supports Extended ASCII.

The following will get you Codepage 1252.

System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);

This will get you ISO 8859-1.

System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(28591);

Both of these are considered Extended ASCII and both contain symbols (mostly with the same byte representation) typically associated with this set, such as © , ¥ , and º . See the referenced links for more information about which characters are included in each encoding.