How to convert a Unicode character to its ASCII equivalent

Solution 1:

Okay, let's elaborate. Both csgero and bzlm pointed in the right direction.

Because of blzm's reply I looked up the Windows-1252 page on wiki and found that it's called a codepage. The wikipedia article for Code page which stated the following:

No formal standard existed for these ‘extended character sets’; IBM merely referred to the variants as code pages, as it had always done for variants of EBCDIC encodings.

This led me to codepage 437:

n ASCII-compatible code pages, the lower 128 characters maintained their standard US-ASCII values, and different pages (or sets of characters) could be made available in the upper 128 characters. DOS computers built for the North American market, for example, used code page 437, which included accented characters needed for French, German, and a few other European languages, as well as some graphical line-drawing characters.

So, codepage 437 was the codepage I was calling 'extended ASCII', it had the ê as character 136 so I looked up some other chars as well and they seem right.

csgero came with the Encoding.GetEncoding() hint, I used it to create the following statement which solves my problem:

byte[] bytes = Encoding.GetEncoding(437).GetBytes("ê");

Solution 2:

You cannot use the default ASCII encoding (Encoding.ASCII) here, but must create the encoding with the appropriate code page using Encoding.GetEncoding(...). You might try to use code page 1252, which is a superset of ISO 8859-1.