EBCDIC file creation

prakash404 · New User Joined: 09 Mar 2010 Posts: 12 Location: chennai

Hi Can any one tell how to create an EBCDIC file

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 1:23 pm

thing like EBCDIC or ASCII or <binary> files do not exist as such...
the EBCDIC/ASCII/<binary> distinction is not in the data itself, but in the external representation and the significance assigned

in a file any bit pattern is valid, the rest depends on the usage

Anuj Dhawan · Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 5:09 pm

You need to do a better job in explaining your problem - All IBM mainframe peripherals and operating systems (except Linux on zSeries or iSeries) use EBCDIC as their inherent encoding (unless something changed) but software can translate to and from other encodings, as Enrico has said.

Ronald Burr · Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 7:36 pm

Be aware that newer versions of DB2 on the mainframe store some system table(s) data in Unicode, not EBCDIC.
Also, output files destined for some printers will be written in ASCII format.

Bill Dennis · Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 7:58 pm

Ronald Burr · Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2010 9:19 pm

Compuset software from Document Sciences, for example, produces metacode output destined for XEROX printers using ASCII notation, because ASCII is the expected input to those printers.

MBabu · Posted: Wed Mar 24, 2010 2:00 am

This info may be wrong (I hate it when people say that, but...): I believe that it is possible to tag files in the Unix file system with a character set or encoding mechanism so that other programs can determine what type of file they are about to process. I have no details, and today is my lazy day, so I'm not in a research mood. Whew! Only 283 more lazy days this year!