thanks rick-


>Hi Tracy,
>
>USB usually translates to serial ports, so you might be able to pick up data through serial port processing (you'll need a library for that).
>
>But it's probably best to see what the drivers and documentation the printer manufacturer provides. If they have a card capture interface there must be some way to capture that data and there surely is some API available. Those types of things usually install a small device driver that poke data into some memory location or out to the keyboard buffer (which is what most barcode readers do).
>
>+++ Rick ---
>
>>VFP9, Windows XP or Windows 2K, SQL Server backend (or VFP tables)
>>
>>A portable printer (handheld size) which communicates via USB. Printing no problem but it also contains a card swipe and I need to capture the card data via USB. Just starting the research on this so I'm looking for ideas in advance before I get started just in case anyone out there has experience with this already. I do have C+ code which supposedly will accomplish this but I haven't dived into it yet...
>>
>>Anyone had any experience doing this and is it limited to drivers, utilities, sdks, or dlls from the printer manufacturer?