> -----Original Message-----
> From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List 
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Godfrey
> Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2006 10:42 PM
> To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU
> Subject: Re: Character set conversoin headaches
> 
> 
> Correction: That should be CRLF to LF.
> 
> Bill

Perhaps I'm confused, but I am fairly sure that z/OS UNIX text files are
delimited by the x'15' code point. This is not an LF (Line Feed). It is
a NL (New Line). All other UNIX systems use LF (Ascii x'0A') as the "end
of line" delimited. IBM for some reason chose NL. An EBCDIC LF is 0x25.
This is why a simple "iconv" of a ASCII UNIX file, ftp'ed to z/OS via
BINARY, results in a "bad" EBCDIC file if you do:

iconv -t IBM-1047 -f ISO8859-1 <ascii.unix.file >ebcdic.unix.file

The 0x0A "line delimiters" in "ascii.unix.file" will be converted to
0x25 in the "ebcdic.unix.file" when they really need to be 0x15. The
conversion is technically correct because ASCII 0x0A is LF, which is
EBCDIC 0x25. But the z/OS UNIX expects 0x15 as the "line delimiter".
Again, because ASCII UNIX system use "Line Feed" as the delimiter
whereas as z/OS UNIX uses "New Line". These are different characters and
thus different code point.

Note that the above "iconv" command works "correctly" on Linux! Why?
Because whomever wrote the conversion table translates ASCII LF to
EBCDIC NL!

--
John McKown
Senior Systems Programmer
HealthMarkets
Keeping the Promise of Affordable Coverage
Administrative Services Group
Information Technology

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