Difference between revisions of "EBCDIC Editing"

Revision as of 19:01, 10 February 2017

All PCs, Macintoshes and most other computers use ASCII characters. However, many files downloaded from IBM mainframe computers use EBCDIC characters. An EBCDIC file will appear as complete gibberish in any ASCII editor or PC program, assuming the editor/program can even open the file.

ASCII and EBCDIC refer to how text characters are represented.

For example:

In ASCII, a byte with hex value “4E” represents the letter “N”, but in EBCDIC the same byte represents the character “+”.

In EBCDIC, the letter “N” is represented with hex value “D5”.

ASCII and EBCDIC have completely different representations for all letters, digits and other characters.

EBCDIC File Types

EBCDIC text files

vEdit an directly edit EBCDIC text files and can translate EBCDIC text files to ASCII and vice versa.

EBCDIC data files based on COBOL data structures

Specialized EBCDIC conversion packages are available that can convert any COBOL data file with packed-decimal, packed-binary, zoned and other special fields into ASCII. Ready for importing into SQL, Access (tm) or other PC databases. Both fixed-length and variable data, and multi-record types are supported.

EBCDIC binary files, not based on COBOL.

An example is the output from Siemens telephone switching equipment. Converting binary files into ASCII often requires a custom VEDIT macro. It also requires detailed information about the file format.