Re: ISBN Lookup
By: Sam Alexander to Angus McLeod on Fri Jun 22 2007 10:46:00
If you don't mind posting, how did you configure your CueCat to do this? I have a few of these sitting in a box someplace, and I've thought about
doing this very thing.
My CueCat is of the type that parallels the keyboard. So when ever any software is waiting for me to key in an ISBN, I just swipe the barcode instead. This sends a short, coded stream of characters to the
application as if I'd typed them. No driver needed. The stream finishes
with an ENTER so the application proceeds as if I'd entered the characters
and pressed the ENTER key.
This is a typical scan stream from my CueCat:
.C3nZC3nZC3nXENvYENz1CNnY.cGf2.ENr7CNz1DNPXCxfZD3PZC3nZ.
It is "encrypted" and contains a serial number, a scan-type and the actual scan data itself. I use the following Perl routine to decode it:
#=========================================#
# Convert raw CueCat scan to useable data #
#=========================================#
sub CCconvert {
$_ = shift;
my @decoded = map {
tr/a-zA-Z0-9+-/ -_/;
$_ = unpack 'u', chr(32 + length()*3/4) . $_;
s/\0+$//;
$_ ^= "C" x length;
} /\.([^.]+)/g;
return wantarray ? @decoded : $decoded[2];
}
which decodes the swipe into three parts and returns them all (if called
in array context) or returns just the scan itself (if called in scalar context). I might call it like this:
$input = <STDIN>;
($serial, $type, $code) = CCconvert( $input );
print "[$serial] [$type] [$code]\n";
which gives:
[000000002961956101] [IB5] [978156592220490000]
The serial number (000000002961956101) is of no use to anyone, so I
usually call it as:
(undef, $type, $code) = CCconvert( $input );
There are quite a few tricks with ISBNs, converting back and forth between ISBN10 and ISBN13 and UPA and so forth. Here are a couple of very useful references:
http://isbntools.com/
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/index.html
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