Henk-Jan, The answer to the question of EBCDIC is probably as varied as the selection of potential trading partners. Being a programmer who works on an EBCDIC-based translation product, I can state that there is really no restriction as to what the trading partners send to it. Of course, this will also depend upon the type of communication protocol they use. We still find many trading partners use value added networks (VANs) to transfer their data and, among other services, they can convert ASCII to EBCDIC and vice-versa. Even something like FTP (for example initiated from an System i/iSeries/AS400 box) can do EBCDIC<->ASCII conversions.
The bigger trick is making sure that the code pages/languages are aligned. It can be confusing because there is not simply one thing called EBCDIC or ASCII. For each there are a large number of national-language-specific variations. For example, in the US, we generally use code page 37 for EBCDIC, but there is a different code page for German, French, UK English, Russian, Japanese, etc., etc. Similarly there are a number of ASCII-based code pages. Generally the basic alphabetic and numeric characters in EBCDIC and ASCII are represented by the same bit patterns (I would have said 'always' but I can even think of an exception to that), but there are certain symbols (some that are used for separators even) that may have different bit representations depending upon the code page selected. In other cases, the same bit patterns will be used to represent different characters (typically, but not limited to specialized national-language characters). It is important that both sides of the exchange understand what the character sets are and, if a 3rd party is involved (a VAN), they would also need to know about such things. Lots of explanation for a seemingly simple question. Hope it makes sense. Best regards, Bill Chessman Inovis(tm) -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of henkjanebbers Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 4:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [EDI-L] Re: Another question about x12 separators/terminators <snip/> So I guess they best way to deal with this is to have a default set of separators/terminators, and to be able to send partner-specific separators/terminators. Do trading partners force the use of EBCEDIC? <snip/> ... Please use the following Message Identifiers as your subject prefix: <SALES>, <JOBS>, <LIST>, <TECH>, <MISC>, <EVENT>, <OFF-TOPIC> Job postings are welcome, but for job postings or requests for work: <JOBS> IS REQUIRED in the subject line as a prefix. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EDI-L/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
