Question

I have an array of bytes that has come from a barcode reader (connected via a COM port) reading an ID Card. When I convert these, I can read some of the data, for example:

Name, Surname, City

etc, but if some of the data has some characters like ‘Ë’ or ‘Ç’, or some characters that are used in our language [ed: OP is in Pristina, Kosovo], I get ‘?’. How can I get these characters through decoding?

Answer 1

You need to know the appropriate Encoding that the device uses; it could be UTF-16, for example, in which case

string s = Encoding.Unicode.GetString(bytes);

or UTF-8:

string s = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes);

but for regional encodings / code-pages you’ll have to use:

string s = Encoding.GetEncoding(yourEncoding).GetString(bytes);