in reply to Conversion of strange characters

I have no idea what you'd call these characters (are they hex?)
If you don't know whether those characters are hex (well, `pr% certainly isn't), how would you or we know how to translate them? For all we know, ABBE02`pr%90073462 is some encoding of The Atlanta Braves will win the Worldseries 2004.

I've amended the mainframe job to stop it reoccurring!)
The world is bigger than OSses run on x86 architectures!

Abigail

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Re: Re: Conversion of strange characters
by elbow (Scribe) on Feb 17, 2004 at 12:00 UTC
    If you don't know whether those characters are hex (well, `pr% certainly isn't), how would you or we know how to translate them?

    sorry - I just thought someone with more experience might have more of an idea what these characters represent...and come across a similar problem with a text file that they'd managed to convert

    elbow
[reply]
      Here are a couple of articles that might have some helpful information.
      from the pen
      perl discuss

      This mod tests for a valid packed decimal. Might have some clues for you as well.
      cpan mod

      More information would definately help. Is it IBM-370 style? COBOL? BCD?

      Or is it just the country code of Puerto rico...

      Kerry
      "Yet what are all such gaieties to me
      Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?"
      quotes the Lama
[reply]
      I have converted many files in the past. There are billions and billions of ways to encode files. If you don't know how it's encoded, you might want to try applying some decryption techniques, but with the handful of bytes you've given, that's a hopeless task.

      Abigail

[reply]
        so is there anything I can do to try and find out the encoding used? Either by checking the details for the mainframe system being used, or something to do with the network system the text file has been paased to?

        Or have I simply not got a chance in hell of being able to sort this out? :-}

        elbow
[reply]

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