Print ASCII line art characters in C# console application

Question

I would like to have a C# console application print the extended ASCII Codes from http://www.asciitable.com/. In particular I am looking at the line art characters: 169, 170, 179-218. Unfortunately when I tried, I ended up getting 'Ú' for 218 and expect to see the other characters from http://www.csharp411.com/ascii-table/.

I'm aware that ASCII only specifies character codes 0 - 127. I found another post with a reference to SetConsoleOutputCP(), but was not able to get that to work in a C# class or find an example of how to do so.

Is it possible to print the line art characters in a C# console application? If it is can someone provide a URL to an example or the code?

Answer 1

A small program that modifies the codepage used by the Console.OutputEncoding property to use the characters you desire:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.OutputEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);
        Console.WriteLine((char) 169);
        Console.WriteLine((char) 170);

        for(char c = (char)179; c <= (char)218; ++c)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(c);
        }
    }
}

EDIT:

So I went ahead and looked up the Unicode equivalents of the box art. There's a few extra glyphs that may be useful to you. That Wikipedia page lists all of their code points.

I've put together this to try them out:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        for(int i = 0x2500; i <= 0x2570; i += 0x10)
        {
            for(int c = 0; c <= 0xF; ++c)
            {
                Console.Write((char) (i + c));
            }

            Console.WriteLine();
        }
    }
}

For me, quite a few glyphs simply come up as ?, but the standard box-art glyphs we're used to seeing in the old ASCII games do appear for me. Hopefully these will work for you.