C# Articles

A CRC8 implementation in C#

So I’ve tackled CRC32, CRC16, CRC16-CCITT (and now CRC16-CCITT Kermit) implementations, and found myself wanting a CRC8 class to create checksums for small data (1-2 bytes) sets. Not having ever used or seen CRC8 in use before, I did some reading, and as far as I can tell, I’ve implemented it correctly… It works anyway, so without further ado, here’s my implementation:

public static class Crc8 {
    static byte[] table = new byte[256];
    // x8 + x7 + x6 + x4 + x2 + 1
    const byte poly = 0xd5;

    public static byte ComputeChecksum(params byte[] bytes ) {
        byte crc = 0;
        if ( bytes != null && bytes.Length > 0 ) {
            foreach ( byte b in bytes ) {
                crc = table[crc ^ b];
            }
        }
        return crc;
    } 

    static Crc8( ) {
        for ( int i = 0; i < 256; ++i ) {
            int temp = i;
            for ( int j = 0; j < 8; ++j ) {
                if ( ( temp & 0x80 ) != 0 ) {
                    temp = ( temp << 1 ) ^ poly;
                } else {
                    temp <<= 1;
                }
            }
            table[i] = (byte)temp;
        }
    }
}
C#

This one differs slightly (API wise) from my previous ones, mainly because I was using it for check-summing smaller bits of data, so I made the ComputeChecksum method a params argument instead of a first class array type.

Here’s a sample of how I was using it (and testing it):

byte crc = Crc8.ComputeChecksum( 1, 2, 3 );
byte check = Crc8.ComputeChecksum( 1, 2, 3, crc );
// here check should equal 0 to show that the checksum is accurate
if ( check != 0 ) {
    Console.WriteLine( "Error in the checksum" );
}
C#

I’ve consolidated all of these into a single library on GitHub here: NullFX.CRC.

I’m also very into Swift at the moment and have created Swift versions of these same classes and released a Swift PM version of this library here as well Swift NullfxCrc Package