Force C# to use ASCII

Question

I\'m working on an application in C# and need to read and write from a particular datafile format. The only issue at the moment is that the format uses strictly single byte

Answer 1

If you have a file format that mixes text in single-byte characters with binary values such as lengths, control characters, a good encoding to use is code page 28591 aka Latin1 aka ISO-8859-1.

You can get this encoding by using whichever of the following is the most readable:

Encoding.GetEncoding(28591) 
Encoding.GetEncoding("Latin1")
Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1")

This encoding has the useful characteristic that byte values up to 255 are converted to unchanged to the unicode character with the same value (e.g. the byte 0x80 becomes the character 0x0080).

In your scenario, this may be more useful than the ASCII encoding (which converts values in the range 0x80 to 0xFF to '?') or any of the other usual encodings, which will also convert some of the characters in this range.