How to print decimal ascii characters?

Hello there,
I have an interesting problem here and i have no idea how to accomplish 
this.

I am printing parcel labels to EPL thermal printers.
These labels have a barcode with an id char at the beginning.

I got a file from our parcel service with routing information and the 
ascii decimal value (!) for that id character.

So the file looks like this:
#Fields: 
DestinationCountry|BeginPostCode|EndPostCode|ServiceCodes|RoutingPlaces|SendingDate|O-Sort|D-Depot|GroupingPriority|D-Sort|BarcodeID|
ES|46101|46109|S299,S302303|GEFDX,GEBED,GENLD,GEALC,GEITD,GEFCO|*|*|0746|9|*|37|

I imported this to my as400 via cpyfrmimpf.
The line above says, that parcels to areas in spain with the zipcodes 
46101 to 46109 should be routed to destination depot 0746 
and the barcode on that label should have the char ascii 37 at the 
beginning (thats '%').

Now i have that '37' in my file on the as400 in an 2a field (drbarc).
And i want to build my barcode like this: 

eval barcode=drbarc+%trim(barcode)

This obviously doesn't work since i just put an '37' in front of my 
barcode.


And my problem is now: how to find out, that decimal ascii 37 is '%', so 
that i can print this in front of my barcode.


Something like:

asciichar=alfa2ascii('37')
// asciichar is now '%'
barcode=asciichar+%trim(barcode)


any hints are greatly appreciated :)


- Martin