Chapter 5
ibic-Interface Bus Interactive Control Utility
© National Instruments Corp.
5-5
NI-488.2M UM for Windows NT
String Syntax
You can enter strings as an ASCII character sequence, octal bytes, hex bytes, or special
symbols.
ASCII character sequence –You must enclose the entire sequence in quotation marks.
Octal bytes–You must use a backslash character followed by the octal value. For
example, octal 40 is represented by
\40
.
Hex bytes–You must use a backslash character and an
x
followed by the hex value. For
example, hex 40 is represented by
\x40
.
Special Symbols–Some instruments require special termination or end-of-string (EOS)
characters that indicate to the device that a transmission has ended. The two most
common EOS characters are
\r
and
\n
.
\r
represents a carriage return character and
\n
represents a linefeed character. You can use these special characters to insert the
carriage return and linefeed characters into a string, as in
"F3R5T1\r\n"
.
Address Syntax
Many of the NI-488.2 routines have an address or address list parameter. An address is a
16-bit representation of the GPIB address of a device. The primary address is stored in
the low byte and the secondary address, if any, is stored in the high byte. For example, a
device at primary address 6 and secondary address 0x67 has an address of 0x6706. A
NULL
address is represented as 0xffff.
ibic Syntax for NI-488 Functions
Table 5-1 and Table 5-2 summarize the syntax of NI-488 functions in
ibic
.
v
represents a number that you input.
string
represents a string that you input. For more
information about the function parameters, use the
ibic
help feature or refer to the
NI -488.2M Function Reference Manual for Windows NT .
