C# big-endian UCS-2

Question

The project I\'m currently working on needs to interface with a client system that we don\'t make, so we have no control over how data is sent either way. The problem is tha

Answer 1

EDIT: Now we know that the problem isn't in the encoding of the text data but in the encoding of the length. There are a few options:

• Reverse the bytes and then use the built-in BitConverter code (which I assume is what you're using now; that or BinaryReader)
• Perform the conversion yourself using repeated "add and shift" operations
• Use my EndianBitConverter or EndianBinaryReader classes from MiscUtil, which are like BitConverter and BinaryReader, but let you specify the endianness.

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You may be looking for Encoding.BigEndianUnicode. That's the big-endian UTF-16 encoding, which isn't strictly speaking the same as UCS-2 (as pointed out by Marc) but should be fine unless you give it strings including characters outside the BMP (i.e. above U+FFFF), which can't be represented in UCS-2 but are represented in UTF-16.

From the Wikipedia page:

The older UCS-2 (2-byte Universal Character Set) is a similar character encoding that was superseded by UTF-16 in version 2.0 of the Unicode standard in July 1996.2 It produces a fixed-length format by simply using the code point as the 16-bit code unit and produces exactly the same result as UTF-16 for 96.9% of all the code points in the range 0-0xFFFF, including all characters that had been assigned a value at that time.

I find it highly unlikely that the client system is sending you characters where there's a difference (which is basically the surrogate pairs, which are permanently reserved for that use anyway).