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Translate UPPER CASE to lower case


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steve-myers

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Joined: 30 Nov 2013
Posts: 917
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 19, 2015 9:33 am
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Just for my amusement I was reviewing some very old topics in Assembler language and came across this one. The "solution" is incorrect, because its author ignored something important: the solution damaged characters that are not upper case characters.

In EBCDIC, lower case characters are in the range X'81' to X'89'. X'91 to X'99', and X'A2 to X'A9'. The upper case characters are in the range X'C1' to X'C9', X'D1' to X'D9', and X'E2' to X'E9'. The classic solution in EBCDIC to translate lower case characters to upper case is to OR X'40' into the character, so lower case a, X'81' becomes X'C1', upper case A. This does not damage a blank (X'40') or the punctuation characters. The solution in the earlier article performed an AND of B'10111111'. This will convert A to a, but a blank will become X'00', and the punctuation characters will be hopelessly damaged.

The "correct" solution uses the TR instruction and a translate table -
Code:
         TR    STRING,TRTAB
         ...
TRTAB    DC    0XL256'0'
         DC    (C'A')AL1(*-TRTAB)
         DC    C'abcdefghi',(C'J'-(*-TRTAB))AL1(*-TRTAB)
         DC    C'jklmnopqr',(C'S'-(*-TRTAB))AL1(*-TRTAB)
         DC    C'stuvwxyz',(256-(*-TRTAB))AL1(*-TRTAB)
         ...
STRING   DC    C'THIS MESSAGE CONTAINS LOWER CASE CHARACTERS'
There are many ways to code this translate table. (C'A')AL1(*-TRTAB) inserts text to translate a character from X'00' to X'BF' to itself, which takes care of blank and the punctuation characters. The remainder of the table I leave to the reader to interpret. Many programmers might choose this -
Code:
TRTAB    DC    256AL1(*-TRTAB)
         ORG   TRTAB+C'A'
         DC    C'abcdefghi'
         ORG   TRTAB+C'J'
         DC    C'jklmnopqr'
         ORG   TRTAB+C'S'
         DC    c'stuvwxyz'
         ORG   ,
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