Can EDCICONV convert EBCDIC to ASCII for some columns ?

natt.sut · New User Joined: 01 Nov 2017 Posts: 8 Location: Thailand

1. My VBS file has some range of column that are BINARY and I do not want to convert it,

Can I put parameter to just convert partial of file ? such as
Convert byte 1-4, and 27-100

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 9:18 pm

what did You deduce by looking at the iconv manual for zOS ???

Nic Clouston · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 9:22 pm

Sawatdee Krahp!

You cannot mix EBCDIC and ASCII in the same data set. It is either one or the other - on the mainframe usually EBCDIC.

As you have a VBS data set changing the first 4 bytes from binary to someother datatype (zoned decimal perhaps) means that your data set is no longer VBS as the VBS information has been lost and your data length has changed as ZD takes more bytes than binary.

The thing is: why do you want to do any of this in the first place?

Robert Sample · Posted: Fri Nov 17, 2017 9:22 pm

EDCICONV invokes the Unix System Services program iconv to convert data. As such, you convert the entire data set / file -- you cannot pick and choose columns to convert. You'll need to write a program in the language of your choice to convert the binary (and packed decimal, if any) columns to zoned decimal before using EDCICONV.

UTF-8 is a variable width encoding; mainframes generally use ISO8859-1 for conversions into / from ASCII. You should read the manual on iconv as it has lots of good information about conversions.