ebcdic=>ascii website

If the information is important to you, hire someone to help you. If
you do it just for fun, install Linux and learn a real OS.

As a small hint, when you have installed Linux, try "man iconv" and
you will se how to use the tool iconv.


Regards, Victor




"dafon" wrote in message ...
If you translate these bytes from one character code to another, you will
render them incomprehensible.

Even if I save it as a new file?



"Charles Jardine" wrote in message
...
dafon wrote:

why yes!
I went with windows!

Then you won't have available to you any tools relevant to
the difficult task of converting the data in a tape written by
one of the old EBCDIC based IBM OSs into a form suitable for
use on a modern OS.

This is not just a matter of converting the character code,
although that can be hard enough, as there were many different
EBDCIC code pages. You have also to cope with the fact the
the old IBM OSs used structured files. Not every byte in such
a file necessarily represents a character. Some byte sequences
may be block descriptors or record descriptors. These were not
encoded in the character code, but were binary values. If you
translate these bytes from one character code to another, you
will render them incomprehensible.

Since these file formats were going out of fashion at the same
time as the Web was coming into fashion, you probably won't
find much information about this topic on the Web.

Hello,

why yes!
I went with windows!
Well, it could be worse...

Then you won't have available to you any tools relevant to
the difficult task of converting the data in a tape written by
one of the old EBCDIC based IBM OSs into a form suitable for
use on a modern OS.
===
Of course 'iconv' should be available as a cygwin port. Apart from
that a small tool called convert.exe (not _the_ FAT32 to NTFS
convert.exe) is also able to do the basic transformation for some common
ebcdic codepages like 037 (US) or 273 (German)

Anyway these tools will help little when accessing real VSAM files
coming from the mainframe due to the "internal formatting".

If the file has "internal formatting" you'd probably need a decent file
format decription unless you're a reengineering pro for such files.

As you asked for webpages...

CYGWIN (UNIX for Windows - yeah, yeah flame me if you like):
http://www.cygwin.com/

Man-page for iconv (e.g. just do a search on "man iconv")
http://www.hmug.org/man/1/iconv.html

Man-page for man (the Jake special
http://www.hmug.org/man/1/man.html

HTH,

Jochen

Jochen Kaiser wrote:

Of course 'iconv' should be available as a cygwin port. Apart from
that a small tool called convert.exe (not _the_ FAT32 to NTFS
convert.exe) is also able to do the basic transformation for some common
ebcdic codepages like 037 (US) or 273 (German)

Looking at my installed cygwin man pages and the page at hmug.org you
ilst, I can't find EBCDIC in the list of supported conversions. Is it
present under some other name? Otherwise, iconv doesn't seem to help.

Tom

Hello,

Of course 'iconv' should be available as a cygwin port. Apart from
that a small tool called convert.exe (not _the_ FAT32 to NTFS
convert.exe) is also able to do the basic transformation for some
common ebcdic codepages like 037 (US) or 273 (German)


Looking at my installed cygwin man pages and the page at hmug.org you
ilst, I can't find EBCDIC in the list of supported conversions. Is it
present under some other name? Otherwise, iconv doesn't seem to help.
===

I use iconv under Solaris and that one includes tables for converting
EBCDIC. E.g. the US-EBCDIC codepage is named IBM-037 and so on...
You should be able to download the conversion tables somewhere and place
them und /usr/lib/iconv .

The Solaris manpage may offer more details in this case:
http://bama.ua.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?iconv+1

Unfortunately I assumed that the implementation was the same for all
flavors of *nix (incl. the ones who say they are not UNIX) but this does
not seem to be the case, at least in regard to supported/installed
codepage conversion tables.

HTH,

Jochen