character encoding - Extended ASCII in C#

Question

I want to store some of the extended ascii characters into a dictionary for lookup but having little issue with getting the conversion.

The current method I have to store these characters works for all the non-graphical looking ascii characters 0x20 to 0xAF.

Current method:

private static void LoadAnsiTable()
{
    for (byte i = 0x20; i < 0xFE; i++)
    {
      AnsiLookup.Add(i, Convert.ToChar(i).ToString());
    }
}

but the 0xAF and on does not have the ? ? ▓ │ ┤╡ ╢ etc it just has these funky letters.

Looking at this table http://www.asciitable.com/ for reference.

This works if I manually add it,

AnsiLookup.Add(0xB0, "?");

I would like to know how I can get those symbols captured in some kind of collection without having to manually add them all?

Answer 1

I assume your "Extended ASCII" is actually code page 437:

Encoding cp437 = Encoding.GetEncoding(437);
byte[] source = new byte[1];
for (byte i = 0x20; i < 0xFE; i++)
{
    source[0] = i;
    AnsiLookup.Add(i, cp437.GetString(source));
}

Beware that this code page is not natively supported by the .NET Framework, so it might not be available on all systems.