Escaping an HP 3000
May 12, 2008
We’re having trouble entering an escape character in MPE’s editor. Is there a trick to it? We’re trying to change the instructions it sends to a printer.
Lars Appel replies:
I typically use some form of change or changeQ command when texting a file that contains escape characters and before saving it again.
:editor
/text myfile
/changeQ ‘27 to ‘126 in all
... edit file ...
/changeQ ‘126 to ‘27 in all
/keep
/exit
Using something like ~ (ASCII code 126) during the edit session. Of course, it only works if there is no ~ normally in the file.
Dave Powell adds:
Nowdays I keep permanent human-readable env files in a separate group, so conversions are one-way only and I never have to change esc back into ~. When I got tired of changing ~ into esc I wrote a simple COBOL program to do it. It also knows how to filter out my comments, so I can make my human-readable env files even more readable.
Craig Lalley adds:
Turn on display functions first.