First, let me thank everyone for their responses to my query. Most of
them have been both educational and helpful.
I want to touch on a few of the responses with comments of my own.
Offline, Alex Brodsky wrote:
AB > found an interesting web page for you -
http://www.tachyonsoft.com/cpindex.htm
with lots of code pages for translation.
Thank You Alex! And thanks to you as well, Dave Bond. This link is a
thorough description of a very large number of code pages, completely
cross referenced my individual characters. It is a wonderful
resource, and I want to thank Dave Bond for putting it together and
Alex for telling me about it.
Also offline, Paul Gilmartin wrote:
DBC >> Should I be asking, what are your favorite translations?
PG > OEMVS311
A Google search quickly revealed that this "OEMVS311" is a translate
table that converts back and forth between ISO 8859-1 (ASCII Latin-1,
aka code page 819) from 1047 (EBCDIC Latin-1). A review at Tachyon of
these code pages showed that they both have every single character I
mentioned in my original post save one (The TM symbol doesn't seem to
occur in ANY character set). I guess that's about as good as it can
get for me, so thank you, Gil.
Also offline, Chaye Wala agreed with the 1047 choice for EBCDIC, but
preferred 437 for ASCII. I looked at it, but 437 does not have a
definitions for the broken vbar, the copyright symbol and the
registered trademark symbol, so for my needs, 1047 remains better.
Richard Tsujimoto wrote:
RT > [snip] I think the problems were with square brackets. Using
037 for MVS didn't work, but I noticed that FTP didn't have a
problem. So, I switched to CCSID 924, which is what FTP used on MVS.
Richard Tsujimoto later reported:
RT > I checked my notes and 1047 did work, but I opened an ETR with
IBM last September, asking what CCSID I should use. They responded with 924.
Yes, 924 does handle square brackets fine, but it doesn't have broken
vbar, and its definition for cent sign (X'B0') is different from what
has been documented on the green card (X'4A') going back several
decades, so for my needs, 1047 remains better.
A couple of people took issue with my indifference to reversibility:
Tony Harminc wrote:
TH > Not having reversible tables is almost always a mistake, in my
experience. It seems like a good idea to start with (who needs that
unpronounceable scripty-looking capital B thing anyway), but it lets
you down when you need it.
And Shmuel Metz wrote:
DBC >> Complete reversibility doesn't matter.
SM > To you. But if you're asking for what others prefer, then you
have to accept what matters to them as part of their answer.
Perhaps. Nevertheless, there are three reasons why reversibility is
not a priority to me.
- First, most of the files for which I want to do this translation
are on a one-way trip to a display device or printer.
- Second, by reversibility, I am referring to the entire set of
256 byte-wide values. Perhaps I am wrong, but once you get past the
set of commonly defined characters, I know of no consensus about how
to translate the remaining bytes.
- Third, most character sets are not congruent (although [as Tony
Harminc points out] 1047 and 8859-1 might be, I haven't yet had time
to examine them thoroughly). Generally, each set will have characters
defined that are not defined in the other.
Finally, Mike Flint suggested:
MF > I use translations:
EBCDIC CP 1146 to/from ASCII CP 850
- dealing with translations purely on mainframe.
On inbound from off-mainframe servers, we use ISO-8859-01 and 5348,
and convert to 1146.
Also use UTF-16BE (CP 1200) on outbound to off-mainframe servers, so
this has been converted from 1146.
But here we use dollar signs, not pounds sterling, so these would not
work so well for me.
So thank you all, I appreciate the input. It has been most helpful.
[:)]
Dave Cole REPLY TO: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cole Software WEB PAGE: http://www.colesoft.com
736 Fox Hollow Road VOICE: 540-456-8536
Afton, VA 22920 FAX: 540-456-6658
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