7bit ascii equal parity posing problems

[bear0053]

fellow monks i have come across a situation that baffeled me.

i have an encryption object running from win32 that returns binary data in 7 bit Ascii (verified in .NET). When perl gets the property from the object and puts the value into a scalar it converts it to binary 7 bit ascii "even" parity. when .NET applications read this data from the encryption object it is simply read in as 7 bit ascii. why is this happening and what can i do to fore it in as 7 bit ascii?

EXAMPLE:
in .NET C# object returns an EOT Hex 04 in 7 bit ascii

in perl the object returns EOT Hex 84 in 7 bit ascii even parity

WHY?
can it be forced to 7 bit ascii or can i convert the 7 bit ascii even parity to 7 bit ascii easily?

the convert route is not optimal for performance, the cpu is already hit from the auto conversion to 7 bit ascii even parity.

Thanks in advance

[Stevie-O]

Not having seen your code, I have no idea why anything is doing anything :) But I can provide you with this little snippet:

$str &= ("\177" x length $str);

That will remove the 8th bit from every character in $str.

[bear0053]

i am using a Win32::OLE object that works like this:

my $obj =  lockpan(); //interacts with a vb6 dll
my $enc_data = obj->encryptval($data); //returns binary val
$enc_data = '0x' . unpack('H*', $enc_data); //bin -> hex
#$enc_data is then written to a sql db

when the code is stored it is stored a 7 bit ascii even parity. so some how perl takes 7 bit ascii and turns it into 7 bit ascii even parity. why and how can i stop this?

[Roger]

I am guessing that you are using Win32::OLE? Have a look at the property get's character code conversion page option. You can have the following code pages: CP_ACP CP_OEMCP CP_MACCP CP_UTF7 CP_UTF8. The default code page is CP_ACP, but you could try the CP_OEMCP to modify its character conversion behaviour. I haven't seen your code, so this is just a guess.