Re: [MI400] base64 encoder/decoder for EBCDIC systems

["Simon Coulter" <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Jim,

You wrote:
>return(((cc >= 33) && (cc <= 60)) || ((cc >= 62) && (cc <= 126))) AND ...
>Basically, that is looking for any "standard" type character.  ASCII

I think that was the original appenders point.  That this code is full of
ASCII specific assumptions.  So it won't work on an EBCDIC machine where
the character representation is different.  It is typical Unix-weenie,
ASCII-specific, C code written by people with no idea that anything else
exists (or being gracious, it may have been optimized for an ASCII
environment by someone who did consider the ramifications but somehow I
doubt it).

The above code returns TRUE if the character is a 'displayable character'
(i.e., printable) in ASCII.  It ain't going to work on an EBCDIC machine
where the 'displayable characters' are scattered throughout a 256
character range and where most of the useful characters are above 127.
Nor does it account for the gaps that appear between groups of alphabetic
characters in EBCDIC -- which are there for a reason.  Nor does it
consider different codepages and character sets where characters like #
and $ may have different representations.

Regards,
Simon Coulter.

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