.Net 8-bit Encoding

Question

I\'m working on serial port, transmitting and receiving data to some hardware at 8bit data. I would like to store it as string to facilitate comparison, and preset data are

Answer 1

I think you should use a byte array instead. For comparison you can use some method like this:

static bool CompareRange(byte[] a, byte[] b, int index, int count)
{
    bool res = true;
    for(int i = index; i < index + count; i++)
    {
        res &= a[i] == b[i];
    }
    return res;
}

Answer 2

Why not just use an array of bytes instead? It would have none of the encoding problems you're likely to suffer with the text approach.

Answer 3

You could use base64 encoding to convert from byte to string and back. No problems with code pages or weird characters that way, and it'll be more space-efficient than hex.

byte[] toEncode; 
string encoded = System.Convert.ToBase64String(toEncode);

Answer 4

Use the Hebrew codepage for Windows-1255. Its 8 bit.
Encoding enc = Encoding.GetEncoding("windows-1255");

I missunderstod you when you wrote "1-255", thought you where refereing to characters in codepage 1255.

Answer 5

Latin-1 aka ISO-8859-1 aka codepage 28591 is a useful codepage for this scenario, as it maps values in the range 128-255 unchanged. The following are interchangeable:

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

The following code illustrates the fact that for Latin1, unlike Encoding.Default, all characters in the range 0-255 are mapped unchanged:

static void Main(string[] args)
{

    Console.WriteLine("Test Default Encoding returned {0}", TestEncoding(Encoding.Default));
    Console.WriteLine("Test Latin1 Encoding returned {0}", TestEncoding(Encoding.GetEncoding("Latin1")));
    Console.ReadLine();
    return;
}

private static bool CompareBytes(char[] chars, byte[] bytes)
{
    bool result = true;
    if (chars.Length != bytes.Length)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("Length mismatch {0} bytes and {1} chars" + bytes.Length, chars.Length);
        return false;
    }
    for (int i = 0; i < chars.Length; i++)
    {
        int charValue = (int)chars[i];
        if (charValue != (int)bytes[i])
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Byte at index {0} value {1:X4} does not match char {2:X4}", i, (int) bytes[i], charValue);
            result = false;
        }
    }
    return result;
}
private static bool TestEncoding(Encoding encoding)
{
    byte[] inputBytes = new byte[256];
    for (int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
    {
        inputBytes[i] = (byte) i;
    }

    char[] outputChars = encoding.GetChars(inputBytes);
    Console.WriteLine("Comparing input bytes and output chars");
    if (!CompareBytes(outputChars, inputBytes)) return false;

    byte[] outputBytes = encoding.GetBytes(outputChars);
    Console.WriteLine("Comparing output bytes and output chars");
    if (!CompareBytes(outputChars, outputBytes)) return false;

    return true;
}