Question

Question:

I query a Quake3 masterserver via UDP, and get the response as below.
As you can see, I had trouble figuring out the encoding of what the server sent…
Is there any way to detect or set the receive encoding ?

            baBuffer = new byte[1024*100]; // 100 kb should be enough
        int recv = sctServerConnection.ReceiveFrom(baBuffer, ref tmpRemote);

        Console.WriteLine("Message received from {0}:", tmpRemote.ToString());

        System.Text.Encoding encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.Default; // Wrong...
        //encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII;
        //encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8;
        //encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(437); // ANSI-DOS
        //encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);// ANSI-WestEurope
        //encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1250); // Ansi-Centraleuro
        //encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-1");
        //encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("ISO-8859-9");
        //encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF32;
        encResponseEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF7; // Bingo !

Answer 1

The encoding (if it is actually text) is determined by the protocol. If you don’t have a protocol spec and you don’t have the source code then, yes, you’ll have to guess.