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[John Corbin]

Someone in my team had brought up the idea of translating a file from ASCII to EBCDIC. The ASCII file is a file from a lan server.

After some thought I got tasked with this...

I have a high level understanding of what to do. Here is my psuedo code:

OPEN ASCII input FILE
OPEN EBCDIC ouptut file

DO WHILE not end-of-file
TRANSLATE ( ASCII-string to EBCDIC-string )
WRITE EBCIDIC string to OUTPUT FILE
END

There would be two tables defined using XRANGE.

1 - ASCII_CHARS
2 - EBCDIC_CHARS

I have two questions:

1 - Will it be a good thing to translate 1 char at a time or will the TRANSLATE function allow me to specify the entire file as an input string.

2 - From the point of view of translating in general, are there any pitfalls to translating between these character sets that I should be aware of?

[kolusu]

John Corbin,

You don't have to write your own logic to translating ASCII to EBCDIC. FTP and IND$FILE can do the conversion. However there are some problems with the conversion.

Not all symbols get translated correctly.

A few of them are

1.exclamation mark (X'21') gets translated to vertical bar (X'4F')

2.Left square bracket (X'5B') gets translated to cents sign (X'4A')

3.Right square bracket (X'5D') gets translated to an exclamation mark (X'5A')

4. Caret (X'5E') gets translated to the Not symbol (X'5F')

And I think there is a problem even with X'80'-X'FF'

Also IBM supplied EZASOKET routines which can be called from any programming language.

The routines are :

EZACIC04 - Translate EBCDIC to ASCII

EZACIC05 - Translate ASCII to EBCDIC

Hope this helps...

Cheers

kolusu
_________________
Kolusu
www.linkedin.com/in/kolusu

[superk]

With all of the standard utilities that can convert data types (DFSORT, OCOPY, SAS to name a few), I would consider this task a bit unnecessary.

However, from the perspective of using the INTERPRET function in a REXX Exec (You didn't exactly state what language you planned to use), then the conversion occurs on a character-to-character basis. The nice thing is that you get to create your own conversion tables.

[John Corbin]

Thanks for the mention of EZACIC04 and EZACIC05...

I cannot find these in a standard REXX user manual....

The application where I have to use is:

Reports are generated by a COGNOS tool of some sort ( in ascii ) and need to be transmnitted to a minaframe that uses ebcdic.

[superk]

The descriptions for EZACIC04 and EZACIC05 can be found in COBOL manuals.

[superk]

Oops, my bad. I found them in the "z/OS V1R6.0 CS: IP Application Programming Interface Guide".

[arnold57]

You can create your own translate table for use with FTP if you don't like the standard one. Usually you would name it 'userid.STANDARD.TCPXLBIN'. The default tables are probably named 'TCPIP.STANDARD.TCPXLBIN'. You can use the CONVXLAT input-file output-file command to create a table. You may be able to find sample input by looking in 'TCPIP.SEZATCPX(STANDARD)' - but this may not be the name on your system.

[infoman123]

[kolusu]

infoman123,

Check this

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/hodhelp/v9r0/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.hod9.doc/help/codepage.html

Kolusu