Monarch 9460 manual M m e n t s i n a S c r i p t, T a S t o r a g e, T a C o d i n g

C o m m e n t s i n a S c r i p t

You must precede comments by a semicolon. The software treats them as a single white space and ignores them.

;*********************************************************

;*

;* Description

;* This is the main entry point of ;* the script. Gets the Date and ;* then starts processing.

;*

;*********************************************************

D a t a S t o r a g e

Although you can define a buffer field as being numeric or alphanumeric, the printer stores both kinds of data as ASCII characters, as follows:

Data Type	Description
Alphanumeric	Sequences of any ASCII characters.
Numeric	Sequences of numeric ASCII characters. For example, the printer
	stores 91 as the two-byte alphanumeric string "91."

D a t a C o d i n g

To streamline the amount of data you store or pass to and from the printer, you can encode the data.

For example, you could encode a number as high as 255 by storing the corresponding character from the ASCII chart. For example, 91 (a two-byte character string, according to printer data storage rules) could appear as [, the ninety-first character on the ASCII chart.

There are two commands you can use in your script when encoding and decoding data according to this method.

Command	Description
ASC	Takes an ASCII character and returns the number corresponding to
	it on the ASCII chart.
CHR	Takes a number from 0-255 and returns the corresponding
	character on the ASCII chart.

Consider the following code sample.
DEFINE TEMPORARY, QTY1, 3, A			;	Alpha Temp. field
DEFINE TEMPORARY, QTY2, 3, N			;	Numeric Temp. field
MOVE	"}",	QTY1	;	Now contains "}"
ASC	QTY1,	QTY2	; Decodes "}" to		125
INC	QTY2	QTY1	; Increments 125		to 126
CHR	QTY2,		;	Encodes 126 to	"~"

This sample demonstrates how to decode a number, use the number in a computation, and encode the result back to a character.

4-4Program Structure