How can I send the null character to the printer?
John Passaniti
John.Passaniti at f201.n260.z1.FIDONET.ORG
Tue Sep 25 00:38:52 AEST 1990
> From: bmyers at garnet.berkeley.edu (Brian Myers)
>
> In order to define some downloadable characters for my
> dot matrix printer, I have to send it a series of
> character values encoding the bit patterns for the new
> characters. Some of those encoded values are zero. Of
> course if I send a string like "\x00\x20\xF3" to stdprn
> with a function like fputs, nothing gets sent, because
> the first \x00 is interpreted as the end of the string.
> Do I need to do a direct bios call (bios_printer)?
> I can certainly manage that, but I just wondered if I
> was missing some more obvious solution within the more
> standard C functions...
First, if you haven't already, you'll probably want to
make sure the stdprn stream is opened in binary mode. I
believe by default it is in text mode. Maybe not-- I don't
remember.
Second, you'll probably want to use a function like
fwrite() to download the characters to the printer.
fwrite() will take a count of how many bytes to send from a
buffer; it doesn't use any embedded zeroes to determine
where to stop.
Hope it helps.
--
*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*
John Passaniti - via FidoNet node 1:260/230
UUCP: ...!rochester!ur-valhalla!rochgte!201!John.Passaniti
INTERNET: John.Passaniti at f201.n260.z1.FIDONET.ORG
*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*%*
More information about the Comp.lang.c
mailing list