How can I convert extended ascii to a System.String?

Question

For example: \"½\" or ASCII DEC 189. When I read the bytes from a text file the byte[] contains the valid value, in this case 189.

Converting to Unicode results in

Answer 1

It depends on exactly what the encoding is.

There's no such thing as "ASCII 189" - ASCII only goes up to 127. There are many encodings which a 8-bit encodings using ASCII for the first 128 values.

You may want Encoding.Default (which is the default encoding for your particular system), but it's hard to know for sure. Where did your data come from?