2D Barcode encoding _ BCOCA

[jwesmann]

Hi, would anyone know how to get a horizontal tab and a carriage return into a 2d barcode using BCOCA?

Copy and paste the tabs from notepad works with an online barcode generator but not with BCOCA.
Also tried $I, ~009, ~d009,^I, various ascii equivalents.

Are we missing some brackets or parenthesis?
Could we use hex, octal or binary equivalent?
Is our problem related to escape sequences?
Could we use Excel with an add-on and a mail merge?

Example of keystrokes and text that we need to capture:
TAB
TAB
TAB
ABC123
TAB
123
TAB
ABC
TAB
<CR>


Thanks,
John

 

[kyle]

I don't know anything about the software you're using, but if it honors C programming/linux conventions, perhaps one of the following might work:

\t \T \x09 \X09 \u09 \U09 \u0009 \U00000009 \011

You could also try the same with doubled backslashes (e.g., "\\t"). That probably won't work, but sometimes is necessary when there is more than one phase of escape sequence parsing.

When barcodes allow a wide range of characters, the encoded data for less common characters usually has to first have a special code to alter the meaning of the next code or two, or to change the meaning of all codes until you shift back. Perhaps there is a method to explicity specify the raw code values (maybe that's what ~d does?). For example, a code 128 barcode in mode B or C would need to shift into mode A by using the appropriate code value, then a tab character could be encoded with value 73 (which isn't its ASCII value but the value chosen for that particular barcode's encoding). You would need to consult a specification for the particular type of barcode you're using if your software can't directly interpret a tab character but allows you to specify the raw code points.