Extended Ascii Characters

Hi All I am in the process of cleaning up an application that was left half finished. I am fairly new to PHP so I am seeking the wisdom of the community to help with a little problem. In many cases I need to build command strings to be sent to a backend system. The strings have to contain a couple of non ascii characters. I have no problem with the following in a script $RM="\xFF"; Then using the variable works fine within that chunk of php code. What I would like to do is place all of the extended ascii characters in one of the inc files and just use these in various scripts throughout the application. When I try what I get is a test representation rather than the actual ascii code. Ie I get \xFF instead of the ascii character ÿ Is there any way to actually do this in php? Regards, Richard Luckhurst Product Development Exodus Systems - Sydney, Australia. rluckhurst@resmaster.com Tel: (+612) 4751-9633 Fax: (+612) 4751-9644 Web: www.resmaster.com ================================================= Exodus Systems - Smarter Systems, Better Business =================================================