sending escape character

[Iain Dooley]

hi, i need to send an escape character with the value 0x1b. how can i 
specify this? i'm sending from php so i did this:

$message = 'Poker '.chr(hexdec('1b')).'40 the glasgow arms';
but it doesn't seem to work. i received the text message:

"Poker ?40 the glasgow arms"

according to the mblox documentation it should have come as:

"Poker @ the glasgow arms"

can anyone shed any light on this?

cheers

iain