Printing Hexadecimal Characters

merrymonk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This has to be simple!
I need to test driving a printer via the LPT1 port.
Unfortunately the printer is several thousand miles away so some things are a bit difficult.
After 'opening' the printer, the C line to output the 'starter' character is fputs (“\x02L\n”, stdaux)
Is the following the correct way of getting the same output with Perl

print PRN hex "0x02";
print PRN "L\n";
[download]

If not I would be grateful to know what is.
Many thanks in advance.

Comment on Printing Hexadecimal Characters Download Code

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Re: Printing Hexadecimal Characters by sauoq (Abbot) on Oct 19, 2005 at 16:32 UTC
Is the following the correct way of getting the same output with Perl No. Don't over-think it. ;-) Try `print PRN "\x02L\n";` [download] -sauoq "My two cents aren't worth a dime.";	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Printing Hexadecimal Characters by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 19, 2005 at 17:11 UTC
No, that prints "2L\n" In string literals, the C syntax works in Perl: `print PRN "\x02"; # or "\x{02} if the next character is a hex digit. print PRN "L\n";` [download] or just `print PRN "\x02L\n";` [download] If you start with a variable containing the number 2, you can use `chr`: `print PRN chr(0x02); print PRN "L\n";` [download] or `pack`: `print PRN pack('C', 0x02); print PRN "L\n";` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]