Author Topic: OnDemand ASCII converter question ?  (Read 1888 times)

bg0hes

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OnDemand ASCII converter question ?
« on: December 21, 2017, 04:35:07 AM »
The source data for this proposed application is Line Data from an IBM mainframe,
so it is EBCDIC, Code Page 278 - Finland/Sweden, fixed block with ANSI carriage
control characters in this case.
The idea is to package selected subsets for transmission to workstations,
which of course means Windows platsforms.

I have tried the 'built-in' ASCII transform:
odHit.retrieve(ODConstant.ASCII,    "C:\\jj\\OD3\\1hitRGBA.txt");
but we are having some difficulties in reading the .txt file.

1) The record length is honoured and the file has lines ended via 0x0A, Line Feed.
This means that the .txt file is correctly shown by Windows Word Pad but not by
'Notes', which expects 0x0D0A   CR+LF

2) The Swedish national characters ÅÄÖ and åäö are correctly translated into two
bytes ASCII characters. C3+..
And the national characters are correctly displayed by 'Notes' while Word Pad displays
each byte individually.
So the file is actually UTF-8 but it does not have the leading indication of 0xEFBBBF.

I made a small experiment of adding these three bytes in front of the data returned and
now it is at least correctly displayed by Word Pad.
I have reread the redbook and others but I am not able to find any parameters which seem to
be meant to influence this translation.

Is this a defect or working as designed?
Is this transfor also being 'phased out' like the AFP-related?

My best idea is to use the interface to a another java class vid ODtransform.XML and
utilize the ICU package to do the translation. This would also allow truncating all
'trailing blanks' which could significantly reduce network load.

Any other suggestion?

Ed_Arnold

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Re: OnDemand ASCII converter question ?
« Reply #1 on: December 26, 2017, 08:58:03 AM »
bg0hes - this is way out of my expertise, but I remembered reading something about this a few years back.

Does this help?

ODWEK messages have incorrect NLS translation, but the Windows client is not affected

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21329772

Ed
« Last Edit: December 26, 2017, 10:13:34 AM by Ed_Arnold »
#zOS #ODF

bg0hes

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Re: OnDemand ASCII converter question ?
« Reply #2 on: January 09, 2018, 07:11:30 AM »
Yes, it looks like it may be the same problem but in another situation. 

Thank you, and how in the Earth do you remeber every thing  :)

regards Hans Erik