BTW:
at the company where I am working at the moment,
we need to build "true" XLS files at the mainframe (no CSVs)
which are then transferred to a Windows network drive, so that
the clients (that is, Accounting people etc.) can fetch them from there.
The problem with mainframe generated CSVs is that ExCel will do
strange things when opening them; for example change numeric values to
date values
etc., because there is no way to specify type information in CSV.
To build the XLS Files on the mainframe and to transfer them to Windows
using FTP, we need a text format protocol, which survives text mode FTP
and can be understood by ExCel.
What we found, and what works very fine for us, is SYLK:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYmbolic_LinK_(SYLK)
So we built a library on the mainframe which generates SYLK files
from our mainframe applications and transfer them automatically
(night Batch) to the Windows network drives, for daily, weekly or
monthly reports. (The mainframe library is written in C, but that
isn't very important, IMO; it could well be COBOL or PL/1 or ASSEMBLER).
If the SYLK files have extension XLS on the network drives, ExCel
will simply open them by double-click, and the user will see no difference
from "normal" ExCel files.
Of course, reading XLS which comes out of real ExCel will be much harder,
if not impossible.
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 17.11.2016 um 18:49 schrieb Paul Gilmartin:
On Thu, 17 Nov 2016 09:01:53 -0600, Bill Woodger wrote:
The only real problem with delimiters is when the delimiter can occur in the
data. Often a good reason for avoiding commas. Tab can be good, as long as the
data cannot contain tab (unlikely for Mainframe data).
Delimiters in the data can be "protected" by enclosing the data of that field in double-quotes. This is only a genuine
problem when the the "other end" can only process text-and-control-codes and when "any value is possible in the
data". However, it can also be an issue due to "diktat" - "this delimiter must be used, otherwise the world
will stop revolving". That's bad when the delimiter can appear in the data.
Monthly, another department publishes a .xlsx file which I wish to parse
with a script. I open it with LibreOffice and export as .html and parse
that with my script. (Ugh! The hard part is process documentation of
the manual process.) No problem with dodging delimiters. .xml might
be a better choice than .html, but I knew I was familiar with .html.
WTF!? Xcel can't export as .xml!?
--gil
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
