McKown, John wrote: > Is there any documentation on the compression algorithm used by TRSMAIN?
The terse algorithm is explained in IBM's US patent 4814746 from 1989, easily viewable at http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT4814746 . The patent contains a PL/I program that is claimed to implement the "invention", though I doubt that it would directly interoperate with implementations like TRSMAIN. And since, of course, this is a patent, presumably in the US and perhaps other countries where software patents are granted, there would be constraints if you did write something using the information therein. It isn't clear to me, however, that the patent has anything to say about decompression, so perhaps implementing that would be OK. But I'm not a patent attorney, etc. etc. so please don't bet your company on this... There are also claims out there on the net that the terse algorithm is really "the same as" LZW, which is also patented, and which I understand is the algorithm that got the GIF graphics format into much trouble some years ago. There are implementations of terse for all sorts of platforms, but IBM doesn't seem to distribute them for much beyond MVS and VM. If you do some severe Googling, you may find, of all things, an OS/2 16-bit version (that will run under Windows), and perhaps even a 32-bit Windows version. There appear to be several flavours of terse, which do or don't handle things like ASCII-EBCDIC and codepage issues, mainframe-only things like PDSs, and various other options. > And is there anyway to ftp that to an ASCII based server and uncompress > it? Yes - this relates to my previous question about RACF IRRADU00 > reformatted records. If you can find an implementation for your platform of choice that understands the mainframe version's options, then sure. But then you still have to process those mainframe records on that platform, which may well be the harder part. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
