I am working on a windows server and have some (I think?) EBCDIC files produced by some COBOL programs. I have looked at various other threads on this site and looked at Convert::EBCDIC on CPAN but I can't seem to convert them to ASCII. This is what I tried
use strict;
use Convert::EBCDIC qw(ebcdic2ascii);

my $ascii_string;

open EBCDIC, "C:\\EDCDICFILE";
    $ascii_string = ebcdic2ascii(<EBCDIC>);
    print $ascii_string;
close EBCDIC;

[download]

I'm getting output but none of it makes sense. Now I suspect that Convert::EBCDIC is not for windows.

If its any help the file has a format which has lots of numbers unprintable characters and then goes into a sort of ! delimited file.

I really need to get to the bottom of this but my understanding here is at its limit.

UPDATE Since posting the supplier of the file has got back to me and explained that the file is not EBCDIC but record seq. He's changing his output to be line seq. which I can just read in so problem solved.

But no new learning is wasted as they say.

In reply to EBCDIC conversions by Scarborough

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.