Zebra Printer and character encoding

Question

I'm in a struggle with the encoding of characters with Zebra Printer.

I'm using ZebraDesigner and, for instance, I create a line with the text "Texte accentué". In the generated .prn file, the line is as follows : ^FT27,67^A0N,28,28^FH\^FDTexte accentu\82^FS

I'm guessing \82 is the encoded version of my letter é, but I don't find any relashionship between them two.

Any help would be welcome.

Answer 1

^CI is the command that sets the encoding. That should be in your output as well. Look at the definition of that command in the ZPL guide to see how it

Answer 2

Ok, I got through it : 0x82 (Hexa) or 130 (Dec) is the encoding for "é" in extended ASCII (Codepages 437 or 850 : http://www.ascii-codes.com/)

To convert my string, I have to use this PHP function :

$text = iconv('UTF-8', 'CP437//TRANSLIT', $text); // Also works with CP850

I finally made this little script, which converts only extended ASCII characters (Decimal code >= 128), as the basic ones are correctly understood, and I wanted my function to be run with the full file as an argument.

function zebraConvert($text)
{
    $return = '';
    $arr = str_split(iconv('UTF-8', 'CP437//TRANSLIT', $text));
    foreach ($arr as $char) {
        $ord = ord($char);
        if ($ord >= 128) {
            $return .= '\\' . dechex($ord);
        } else {
            $return .= $char;
        }
    }
    return $return;
}