Finding Non-ascii characters?

rehan · New User Joined: 13 May 2007 Posts: 6 Location: India

Hi Friends,
Can any one tell is there a way to find non-ascii chracters in a seq file?

Robert Sample · Posted: Sun Nov 15, 2009 7:58 pm

If the sequential file is on the mainframe, ALL CHARACTERS ARE NON-ASCII. Mainframes use EBCDIC, not ASCII.

rehan · New User Joined: 13 May 2007 Posts: 6 Location: India

thanx for replying what i need is my files are sent for printing and the printing system identifies only ASCII characters and the recently printing system has identified junk values in the file
can u tell me how to avoid this in future?

Robert Sample · Posted: Sun Nov 15, 2009 8:24 pm

First, you have to find out which characters the printer doesn't support -- the upper and lower case letters and numbers are always supported, but the special characters can be problems.

Then, you need to write code (program or SORT statements) that examine each and every character of your file and replace any of the invalid characters with something valid (such as a space).

Then, be aware that scanning a file character by character is a time-consuming process and there's not a whole lot you can do to reduce the amount of time it takes.

dick scherrer · Posted: Sun Nov 15, 2009 10:57 pm

Hello,

Suggest you look at the process that generates the file to be sent and make sure there are no invalid characters in the data. Two of the biggest causes of this is uninitialized data in the output or sending a binary or packed-decimal value.

As Robert mentioned, it is quite expensive passing an entire file and looking at every character to be sure it is acceptable.

Far better to create the file correctly in the first place.