Why not UTF-8 since all sequences of characters in the ASCII set is encoded in UTF-8 in the same sequence of bytes as it would be in ASCII. Also, the first byte is sufficient to determine exactly how many additional bytes are required for the whole character to be decoded (if any additional bytes will be required). I thought most classes used UTF-8 by default if no encoding was specified?


>I have this code to get the content of a URL:
>
>

>        ' Get the HTML response from a server
>        ' expC1 Url
>        Public Function GetUrl(ByVal tcUrl As String) As String
>            Dim lcHTML As String
>            Dim loHTTP As System.Net.WebClient = New System.Net.WebClient
>            Dim loEncoding As System.Text.Encoding = New System.Text.ASCIIEncoding
>            Dim loRequestedHTML() As Byte
>            Try
>                loRequestedHTML = loHTTP.DownloadData(tcUrl)
>                lcHTML = loEncoding.GetString(loRequestedHTML)
>            Catch loError As Exception
>                lcHTML = loError.Message
>            End Try
>            Return lcHTML
>        End Function
>

>
>I am wondering about the declaration of the loEncoding. I put ASCIIEncoding for now. But, when getting the content of a URL, is that the proper encoding to use?