{"id":310,"date":"2012-10-02T21:10:45","date_gmt":"2012-10-02T21:10:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/62.131.51.129\/wordpress\/?p=310"},"modified":"2012-10-02T21:10:45","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T21:10:45","slug":"ascii-or-ebcdic-how-to-recognise-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/?p=310","title":{"rendered":"ASCII or EBCDIC: how to recognise it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, I heard someone complaining that he received a file that contained “unexpected characters”. Later it was discovered that this file was provided in EBCDIC and the receiver tried to open it on a UNIX box with an ordinary editor. Such a UNIX box assumes the ASCII lay-out and as the file was delivered in EBCDIC, the characters shown were not comprehensible.<\/p>\n

What is the difference between ASCII and EBCDIC? <\/p>\n

Roughly stated ASCII and EBCDIC both translate a byte into a character. A byte may have 256 different values. A byte then ranges from 0 to 255. In heximal format: it ranges from 00 to FF. This implies that a byte with heximal value 20 is ASCII interpreted as a blank. It also implies that a byte with heximal value 40 is EBCDIC interpreted as a blank.
\nWe can see the heximal values when we toggle in a text-editor between the normal representation and the heximal representation. On my laptop, I have a text editor (Notepad++) that allows such a toggle. My laptop uses the ASCII representation and toggling shows that “TOM ” is equivalent to heximal values “54 4F 4D 20”. On Windows and Unix the ASCII representation is most often used and text editors on either a Windows box or a UNIX provide you with the heximal representation.
\nOn the other hand, EBCDIC is used on IBM mainframes. There, we also have the possibility to show the heximal values. See:\"\"<\/a>.<\/p>\n

All right. Assume, we get a file that contain strange characters. Do we have a EBCDIC\/ASCII mix up?
\nIf we are working on a Windows or Unix box, we see the ASCII representation. We know that the ASCII heximal value of “@” is 40. This 40 is translated into a space under EBCDIC. Hence: if we see in an editor on a Windows\/Unix box many “@”, we may suspect that an EBCDIC file is delivered whereby the blanks are translated into ASCII “@”.
\nAnother possibility is to look at the heximal representation. If we see many “F0”, we may suspect an EBCDIC file as the EBCDIC heximal value F0 stands for a “0”. Hence: many heximal values of F0 indicate EBCDIC as any file may contains many 0.
\nHence: enough clues to find out if an EBCDIC file is delivered in stead of an ASCII file!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, I heard someone complaining that he received a file that contained “unexpected characters”. Later it was discovered that this file was provided in EBCDIC and the receiver tried to open it on a UNIX box with an ordinary editor. Such a UNIX box assumes the ASCII lay-out and as the file was delivered in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nice-to-know"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=310"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archief.van-maanen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}