I need to print a SSCC Code 128 barcode using Zebra ZPL. My problem is that the escape characters used are also encoded in the barcode, which should not happen.
Here is the code:
^FO50,960^BY3
^BCN,180,N,N,N,A
^FD>;>800{sscc}^FS
The sequence >;>8, which is the escape / control sequence, gets encoded in the barcode. So when I read the barcode with a scanner, I get: >;>800xxxxxx....
What am I missing here?
Reposting this as an answer. You are using Automatic mode (the A at the end of the ^BC command). Automatic mode disables escape sequences since it applies its own shift/latch logic. Use mode N (None) to allow manually encoding the data.
Related
There is a service hosted on for generating barcodes metafloor.com using bwip.js
I want to generate a barcode for following data (GS character is represent by {GS}).
(01)10875066000333(10)1212{GS}(17)121212(30)8{GS}
According the documentation I'm able to generate a barcode for data without GS character
https://bwipjs-api.metafloor.com/?bcid=gs1-128&text=(01)10875066000333(10)1212(17)121212(30)8
But the scanner require GS characters.
The documentation is clear
Special characters must be encoded in format ^NNN
Parse option has to be true, by using parsefnc parameter
The parameter has to be URL-encoded.
So for my string it's:
https://bwipjs-api.metafloor.com/?bcid=gs1-128&text=(01)10875066000333(10)1212%5E029(17)121212(30)8%5E029&parsefnc
But this gives me Error: bwipp.GS1badCSET82character: AI 10: Invalid CSET 82 character.
I also tried
Send GS char directly as %1D
Send GS char as %5EGS
Send GS char as ^029
Send GS char directly
Set parsefnc=true
Combination of all above
But still getting the same error.
Is there something I'm doing wrong or is the problem on the other side?
For GS1 Application Identifier based data, trust the library to encode the data correctly by selecting the GS1-specific encoder for the symbology (gs1datamatrix in this case) and then provide the input in bracketed AI notation, i.e. without FNC1 / GS separators.
The encoder will automatically add all of the necessary FNC1 non-data characters (which are transmitted as ASCII GS characters when read by a scanner) and it will also validate the contents of the AI data that you supply.
Users that select a generic symbology and then attempt to perform the AI encoding themselves are prone to making several mistakes:
Omitting the required FNC1 in first position.
Omitting the required FNC1 separators at the end of AIs with no pre-determined width.
Terminating pre-defined length AIs with unnecessary FNC1 characters.
Terminating the message with an unnecessary FNC1 character.
Encoding ASCII GS data characters instead of the canonical FNC1 non-data characters.
Including illegal, literal parentheses to denote the AIs.
Providing improperly formatted or invalid AI values.
Omitting requisite AI attributes.
Including mutually-exclusive AI pairings.
Many of these mistakes will result in failure to decode and interpret the GS1 AI data (even if the barcode appears to read successfully) which may result in charge-backs and necessitate relabelling or disposal.
The data that you are providing falls afoul of at least some of these pitfalls.
See this article for a thorough description of the checks that BWIPP (and hence BWIP-JS) implements to prevent such data quality issues.
I have the following ZPL code
^FO25,215^A0,N,25,25^BCN,100,N,N,N,U^FN21^FS
The customer wants this barcode as a UCC 128 barcode, but their data is alphanumeric.
Research
I looked through the ZPL docs which mentions:
option U for the mode defaults to Subset C which automatically strips out the alpha characters.
can prepend the entry with >9 or >7 to make this Subset A which allows alphanumerics.
Issue
I tried:
^FO25,215^A0,N,25,25^BCN,100,N,N,N,U^FN>721^FS
But it still removes the letters from the barcode.
Not only that, but it adds 7 as well.
There is nothing that precludes using alphanumeric with UCC-128 (aka GS1-128).
GS1-128 compliant format
What you must do for a code128 barcode to be GS1-128 compliant is to format the data correctly.
That means the barcode data must be formatted as:
<fnc1> <app-id> <value>
Where:
<FNC1> character in ZPL is >8 for all character sets.
<app-id> is the application-identifier (AI) for your barcode purpose
<value> is the (alpha-numeric) data to be encoded with the barcode
A good summary of UCC application-identifiers (AI) gives UCC-128, EAN-128 & GS1-128 Bar Code Explained (wayback archive from 2017).
Example
Let's say you would use an AI of 10 and are encoding the batch number 1702ABCD.
Then the resulting ZPL field data would be: ^FD>8101702ABCD^FS
i was expecting this command
^FO15,240^BY3,2:1^BCN,100,Y,N,Y,^FD>:>842011118888^FS
to generate a
(420) 11118888
interpretation line, instead it generates
~n42011118888
anyone have idea how to generate the expected output?
TIA!
Joey
If the firmware is up to date, D mode can be used.
^BCo,h,f,g,e,m
^XA
^FO15,240
^BY3,2:1
^BCN,100,Y,N,Y,D
^FD(420)11118888^FS
^XZ
D = UCC/EAN Mode (x.11.x and newer firmware)
This allows dealing with UCC/EAN with and without chained
application identifiers. The code starts in the appropriate subset
followed by FNC1 to indicate a UCC/EAN 128 bar code. The printer
automatically strips out parentheses and spaces for encoding, but
prints them in the human-readable section. The printer automatically
determines if a check digit is required, calculate it, and print it.
Automatically sizes the human readable.
The ^BC command's "interpretation line" feature does not support auto-insertion of the parentheses. (I think it's safe to assume this is partly because it has no way of determining what your data identifier is by just looking at the data provided - it could be 420, could be 4, could be any other portion of the data starting from the first character.)
My recommendation is that you create a separate text field which handles the logic for the parentheses, and place it just above or below the barcode itself. This is the way I've always approached these in the past - I prefer this method because I have direct control over the font, font size, and formatting of the interpretation line.
I have some UTF-Text starting with "ef bb bf". How can I turn this message to human read-able text? vim, gedit, etc. interpret the file as plain text and show all the ef-text even when I force them to read the file with several utf-encodings. I tried the "recode" tool, it doesn't work. Even php's utf8_decode failed to produce the expected text output.
Please help, how can I convert this file so that I can read it?
ef bb bf is the UTF-8 BOM. Strip of the first three bytes and try to utf8_decode the remainder.
$text = "\xef\xbb\xbf....";
echo utf8_decode(substr($text, 3));
Is it UFT8, UTF16, UTF32? It matters a lot! I assume you want to convert the text into old-fashioned ASCII (all characters are 1 byte long).
UTF8 should already be (at least mostly) readable as it uses 1 byte for standard ASCII characters and only uses multiple bytes for special/multilingual characters (Character codes > 127). It sounds like your file isn't UTF8, or you'd already be able to read it! Online content is generally UTF-8.
Unicode character codes are the same as the old ASCII codes up to 127.
UTF16 and UTF32 always use 2 and 4 bytes respectively to encode every character, whether those characters can be represented in a single byte or not. That makes it unreadable if the text editor is expecting UTF8.
Gedit supports UTF16 and UTF32 but you need to 'add' those encoding explicitly in the open dialog box (and possibly select them explicitly instead of using auto-detect)
Suppose I allow my users to submit a form containing some text fields (I'm not talking about passwords). My users would occasionally use non-ASCII characters like Russian, Chinese, etc. so I use UTF-8 charsets in my database. The question is, should I really allow all of the possible UTF-8 characters? I had a look at the ASCII table and saw that characters 0 to 31 have nothing to do with text, except for newlines and white spaces. Characters 176 to 223 seem to be for decorative purposes :p. Should I restrict them?
The W3C skips these characters in their example regular expression in Multilingual form encoding:
$field =~
m/\A(
[\x09\x0A\x0D\x20-\x7E] # ASCII
| [\xC2-\xDF][\x80-\xBF] # non-overlong 2-byte
| \xE0[\xA0-\xBF][\x80-\xBF] # excluding overlongs
| [\xE1-\xEC\xEE\xEF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # straight 3-byte
| \xED[\x80-\x9F][\x80-\xBF] # excluding surrogates
| \xF0[\x90-\xBF][\x80-\xBF]{2} # planes 1-3
| [\xF1-\xF3][\x80-\xBF]{3} # planes 4-15
| \xF4[\x80-\x8F][\x80-\xBF]{2} # plane 16
)*\z/x;
Make sure it is valid UTF-8 and Unicode? Yes
Make sure it does not include certain characters, such as control codes? Probably not necessary
You should be aware that even though you are using UTF-8 in your form, you may not get valid UTF-8 from all user-agents when they send form data to you, and you will have to filter it as necessary. Invalid UTF-8 can take many forms, some of them being
Overlong encodings (which can lead to security issues)
Other invalid UTF-8 byte sequences, which may indicate that the user-agent ignored the character encoding and has submitted something like Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 encoding instead.
Code points that lie in reserved surrogate space in Unicode
All the above need to be filtered out during input, otherwise you are not storing valid Unicode.
If you want to serve valid HTML or XHTML, which use a subset of Unicode, you will need also need to filter out (either at input or output):
C0 control codes 0x00 to 0x19 (apart from tab, space, new line, carraige return)
0x7F
C1 control codes 0x80 to 0xBF
(probably) any code point above 0x10FFFF
No.
It's a very bad idea to try to "pre-clean" user input. What you consider "decorative" might be absolutely necessary to readers of another language. The best solution is to store the text as-is in the database, and then sanitize it before writing to the page.
When you say "the ASCII table" you're talking about this page, aren't you? That page is garbage. Only the first 128 characters (ie, 0..127) are "ASCII"; the mappings they show for the numbers 128..255 are from an ASCII extension called cp437. There are a lot of "extended ASCII's" out there, and cp437 is far from the most common one.
But I digress. Your question isn't about character encodings, it's about filtering, and a filter should be based on the properties of the characters: is it a letter, a digit, a control character? Most modern programming languages provide methods or functions to obtain such information, and most provide regex support as well. As for what you should filter, or whether you should filter at all, only you can know that.
It sounds like you need to learn more about character encodings and Unicode, though. Start here.