I have an application that is to read user information from a swipe card (Magnetic Strip). How do i go about doing this?
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Hi ,
Another option is to use a keyboard with the magstripe built in such as described in the link below. One of the downsides to this though is if the units fails you lose a keyboard and a magstripe reader. This is unusual these days though and their cheap enough to have a couple spare.
http://www.datacal.com/dce
Regards
Mike Andrews.
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: tmedleyPosted on 2005-03-07 at 11:18:58ID: 13479681
Your best bet is to use a swipe card reader that provides its output as keyboard input and use a Y splitter to plug in both the KB and the reader. The readers are usually programmable for what start and stop characters to put on each track read off the mag card. Most cards are going to be coded to start with a % sign. When we write apps to work with readers, we leave the default programming alone so we get sent the % sign. We capture this in the keypress event of our text box or whatever or set keypreview .T. on our form to check the key value before letting the control with focus have it. This way we can offer different behavior for swiped versus keyed input (like for credit card transactions that are card present or not present.)