2019 SDK IPrinter.SendDataToPrinter What format is Data byte[]?

[shawnWork]

Question: What format/encoding should be the data byte[]?
- Base64, Ascii, etc.?

Information copied below from Nice Label SDK Help File.

Printer.SendDataToPrinter Method NiceLabel SDK.NET

Sends the data to printer by creating a new print job and sending it to the spooler.

Namespace: NiceLabel.SDK
Assembly: SDK.NET.Interface (in SDK.NET.Interface.dll) Version: 17.2.0.0 (19.2.1.5400)
Syntax
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

C#VBC++F#Copyvoid SendDataToPrinter(
byte[] data
)
Sub SendDataToPrinter (
data As Byte()
)
void SendDataToPrinter(
array<unsigned char>^ data
)
abstract SendDataToPrinter :
data : byte[] -> unit


Parameters
data
Type: System.Byte[]
The data for the print job.
See Also
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reference
IPrinter Interface
NiceLabel.SDK Namespace

[Mytch]

Hi,

Your "data" byte[] array should contain content that is encoded in a format which is understood by the destination printer (varies by PCL). This content contains the raw print commands which you will send to the hardware. There is no requirement from NiceLabel perspective, I would say UTF-8 is preferred over ASCII since I cannot see the benefit of the inverse.

The most common use-case is just reading an existing file to byte array then sending that directly to the printer, so it often just comes down to the format of existing content.

Simple example sending ASCII test to Zebra printer:

2022-12-06_16h30_26.png (53.42 KiB) Viewed 68 times

You can see we have sent 4 bytes of data to the printer, but in practice this should contain real ZPL commands for this printer.

Mytch