Discover the character encoding from byte

Question

I have a string where I know that the degree symbol (°) is represented by the byte 63 (3F).

Each character is represented by a single byte.

How can I find the character encoding used ?

Answer 1

Almost all 8-bit encodings in modern times coincide with ASCII in the ASCII range, so byte 3F hexadecimal is the question mark “?”. As Sebtm’s comment suggests, this might result from character-level data error. E.g., some software that is limited to ASCII could turn all other bytes to “?” – not a good practice, but possible.

If it were a non-ASCII byte, you could use the page http://www.eki.ee/letter/chardata.cgi?search=degree+sign to make a guess.