I am trying to deal with a problem apparently created for me by Mr. Gates & Co.
I need to send files from CMS to end users on PCs, where the
files contain data which represents Hebrew characters. I gave
SMTP a translation table which converts the EBCDIC representation
of Hebrew to the ASCII used by Windows, but the PC is a smart alec,
and also reverses the character order, since Hebrew reads right to left.
So, if I have input records like this on CMS:
2008 12987 65084 abcdefgh 78346 45239 tuvwxyz 873468
2009 31 836 ijklmno 169827 8373 mnop 34902
(Note: the letters in the actual record will be Hebrew! I only used
English to prevent the confusion that happens when the order gets
reversed. And besides, how many of you have Hebrew fonts?).
If I SendFile a file of those records to a MS-Win system,
the characters will be displayed on the screen as hgfedcba, zyxwvut,
etc. In order to have the data normal when it arrives, I need
to reverse the field which contains the Hebrew text, but obviously NOT
the other parts of the record, which would destroy the numeric values.
What I think would be my favorite solution would be for the REVERSE
stage to accept inputranges, as the XLATE stage does. That would be great!
A simple ... | REVERSE 22-31 48-56 | ... would solve my problem
easily and elegantly. But... REVERSE has no ranges. :-(
Since the EXEC I am writing must deal with many different
files, and will receive external arguments defining the positions
of the Hebrew fields, I need a generalized solution. I tried something
with a particular case, where I knew the positions (only one
Hebrew field 5-24) and the record length (fixed 32):
...
'F1: FANOUT |',
'F2: FANINANY |',
'JOIN 1 |',
'SPECS 1-32 1 33-* 5 |',
'>' OUTPUTID,
'? F1: |',
'SPECS 5-24 1 |',
'REVERSE |',
'F2:'
How would I generalize this? And is there a better way?
Thanks!
Shimon
