2009-10-16 Pommier, Rex R. <rex.pomm...@cnasurety.com>: > Not from what I found. Basically from what I found, the differences are > in a half-dozen characters have different representations. The square > brackets, exclamation point, cent sign, vertical line, not sign and > caret have different representations.
That's really the *good* news... All three code pages you mentioned encode exactly the same set of characters - what IBM calls Character Set 697. So they are all perfectly translatable in any combination; you "only" have to know which codepage a particular set of data is in, and you can translate it trivially to another. And if you use the right tables, it is all round-trippable, so there is no reason for data to ever get messed up just because you send it from one platform or application to another and back. Even better news is that CS 697 is the same character set encoded by ISO 8859-1 (known by IBM as CP 819), which is the most widely used CP on UNIX boxes. Radoslaw doubtless has a more complex situation, because Polish is not covered by the characters in CS 697, so he will be using at least one different CS for that, but perhaps also a CS 697 codepage for compatibility with American or Western European applications. > We don't send anything to Europe, just to *ix boxes in house. We > discovered the problem when we transferred some data to a *ix box and > the company name had an exclamation point in it on the mainframe (code > page 37). When it got to the *ix box, the exclamation mark was changed > to a right square bracket due to code page 500. CP 500 is indeed one of the more different CS 697 CPs, and seems to have originated in IBM's Office Products division, way back when. CPs 1047 and 037 are almost identical; the square brackets being the main issue. Tony H. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
