[Tutor] converting EBCIDIC to ASCII

[Flynn, Stephen (L & P - IT)]

I am trying to convert an EBCIDIC file to ASCII, when the records are
fixed length I can convert it fine, I have some files that are coming in
as variable length records, is there a way to convert the file in
Python? I tried using no length but then it just reads in to a fixed
buffer size and I can't seem to break the records properly

Hi Craig,

	You might find it easier to pass the records through iconv if
you're on a Linux/Unix box and convert to ISO8859 from IBM037 (or
whatever codepage your ENCDIC files are in). There are versions of this
gnu software for Windows too, if that's your platform - it's trivial to
use. Shout if you need a hand.

	Saying that, you'll almost certainly find that the 4 byte RDW
has been stripped from the file when it was sent to you, so you're not
being given any information to determine the length of each variable
length record.

	Quick way to check - open the EBCDIC file up in an hex editor (I
use HxD (from http://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/as it will happily run in EBCDIC
mode). If you can't see 4 bytes at the start of each record, then you're
in trouble as you have no way of determining the record length, without
the copybook for the file on the mainframe.

S.


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