Question
What is the default character encoding used by most Cisco devices when communicating over the console?
Background
I'm a software developer, writing an application that interfaces with several cisco devices via their console ports (basically, it runs IOS configuration commands and responds to certain feedback–like errors).
My software runs under mac/windows/linux and each OS has it's own default character encoding systems. So I have to be very careful when I send bytes to the console and when I receive bytes from the console. If I don't specify the right character encoding, things break in whacky ways. Like when I "press return" after sending a command, on certain systems, it will "press return" twice, instead of once! Or, when I receive data and try to make sense of it, the program will get confused by the incorrect byte/character conversion.
Summary
If I power on a new (or freshly reset) Cisco 3845 or 2955 and connect via the console and send data/bytes/characters back and forth…
…what encoding will the device use, by default. My suspicion is that it's UTF-8.
Best Answer
If its american gear, I think I can safely state that it just uses ASCII for its normal text. It probably won't perform any kind of character set checking, so user-defined names could be any character set as long as the individual bytes are valid as far as the device is concerned. If you receive gibberish from a serial connection, the port is configured incorrectly. When I was younger and actually used serial ports on a regular basis I could sometimes recognize the kind of gibberish and identify which setting was wrong.
As for issues with the enter key, the device will use the same character for "enter" whether you are connecting from windows (where newline is
\r\n) or unix (\n) or mac (\r), pick one that works right and it should always work. Depending on how you are connecting (Directly to the serial port device or taking control of a terminal application?) there may be settings like "local echo" that causes what you type to be printed on your screen by the terminal application (Most gear echos text for you so turning on local echo will cause all the letters to be duplicated)