On 12/29/2011 09:19 AM, Brad Wissink wrote:
We have a client that is trying to transfer us a file and it is loaded with
nulls. They say that is the way it comes from the purchased software they have
on their workstation. The file has a null character inserted after every
character so it looks like this
1 12/29/2011 becomes F1004000F100F2006100F200F9006100F200F000F100F100.......
Has anyone seen anything like this before? Is there a quick and easy way to
remove all the nulls?
It's almost as if they are using software that somehow mistakenly thinks
EBCDIC is a two-byte character encoding, or the process for conversion
to EBCDIC was written by a neophyte programmer who treated each
character as a null-terminated string and some how managed to include
the null termination for each character when outputting the converted
data. Maybe they have their software package mis-configured in some
way, or since they are talking about workstation software producing the
data, the software package generating the data may be ignorant of EBCDIC
and the fault may be in what technique they are using after-the-fact to
either convert the data to EBCDIC or transmit the data with conversion.
If at all possible, try to get clarification of exactly what software
and options they are using to produce the data and exactly what
technique and options they are using to transmit the data. If possible,
get them to transmit via other methods (Email, FTP, etc.) samples of any
intermediate files as binary data so you can see exactly what data
format they are really dealing with on their workstation (as opposed to
what the client may think he has). If they are really transmitting
twice the number of needed bytes, fixing the problem at their end would
be the better solution. Perhaps given enough background on what they
are doing, a solution would become obvious, or you would be able to
search on-line for a solution if the client lacks the technical
expertise to do so on their own.
If everything is kosher on their end and the byte doubling is somehow
occurring just on your receiving system, then hopefully you will have
enough to be able to recreate and fix the problem on your end. Just
cleaning up bad data after the fact will work, but is not as desirable
as eliminating the creation of the bad data in the first place.
--
Joel C. Ewing, Bentonville, AR [email protected]
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