Programming

Packed decimals, thank you, that's the term I was reaching for.

Well, is your input packed decimal? If you don't know, neither do we. Context is important, since the difference between -37 or a handful of illegible control characters is just which interpretation you take.

The terms zoned, packed decimal, comp-2, and comp-3 are not EBCDIC; they are COBOL or PL/1 datatypes (like int, long, float, and double are C datatypes; which are not necessarily ASCII, or UTF-8, or EBCDIC).

Hi Don

Can u pls let me know of any libraries in c++...to convert such cobol output in ebcdic to ascii....i have to convert on selective fields......

I am using g++ compiler on linux

I don't know of any C++ libraries to convert COBOL datatypes to/from C++ datatypes.

As I said before, zoned decimal and packed decimal have nothing to do with ASCII or EBCDIC; they are binary formats.

I assume that you have already googled packed decimal and have read this Wikipedia page on Binary-coded decimal. It should give you all you need to convert packed decimal to a C++ integral type. (And, if you have the right hardware, there are assembly language instructions to do the vast majority of the work for you.)

We need context. It'd be all too easy for us to write a function which uses different types from what you have. Show us some code from around where you need the translation code.

Write a cobol program. Its the easiest way to do it. Besides packed decimal, there are also multiple types of signed fields, and binary fields.

GNU Cobol (formerly OpenCOBOL) | Free Development software downloads at SourceForge.net

Hi Don,

a) Are there any libraries for cobol conversion to ANY other formats?
b) Similarly are there any libraries for ebcdic to ascii

We want to use libraries instead of implementing C++ code for which we do not have much expertise

Thanks & Regards,
Asif