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From: John.Passaniti@f201.n260.z1.FIDONET.ORG (John Passaniti)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: How can I send the null character to the printer?
Message-ID: <40.26FE7D77@rochgte.FIDONET.ORG>
Date: 24 Sep 90 14:38:52 GMT
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 > From: bmyers@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.


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John Passaniti - via FidoNet node 1:260/230
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