Thread: USE of char \377

I have seen this char at many places in the code base , Its something to deal with signed and unsigned char ?
Can some plese tell what is this exactly used for

Originally Posted by matsp

What code-base is that. I haven't found it particularly often in my 20+ years as a programmer. It is the same as 0xFF (or -1 in signed chars). It is, as far as I know, an "unprintable" character in ANSI 8-bit character sets, so it may be used for special purposes by some people since it's unlikely to appear in texts - particularly where you can't use NUL (another unprintable character) since it's the "end of string marker". But that's speculatin. Perhpas I would be able to give a better answer if you point us to the code?

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Mats

It is being used at the starting of a string , and with this we are trying to set a PDL variable [Printer Descriptor Language].
Can we use this char to set a XML string variable also ??

code snippet

AddData("@PJL SET JOBATTR=\"JobAcct7=\377Internal Page\"\r\n");

i was going through google looking at varios code snippets , and in all these this char was use to do some signed unsigned operations .

\377 is octal for:

• 255 decimal
• FF hexadecimal
• 1111 1111 binary

It is unprintable and is most likely being used as a control character of some sort.

Todd

Thanxs a lot everyone ,1 more question ,
If i have a nonnegativeinteger in XML Schema , and i try to set it with a negative integer , will the system crash ??

Originally Posted by manohar.amit

code snippet

AddData("@PJL SET JOBATTR=\"JobAcct7=\377Internal Page\"\r\n");

Are you asking what \377 actually means, or are you asking whether a code of \377 is valid when occurring inside a PJL environment attribute? As far as C is concerned, there is nothing special about the value \377. I have no idea what restrictions XML may have. But as far as PJL, this is valid PJL.

BTW, this is the first time somebody has ever asked a question that relates to my day job

Originally Posted by MacGyver

You have a job that involves using ridiculously high ASCII chars?

My day job is among other things to be ridiculously well-versed in PJL, PCL, and HPGL/2 printer languages.