"ascii, not hex." was: RE: RPG400 write a pc file to Folder

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Moore, Debbie   (RCIS) wrote:

> No. From my understanding: Cant write it cause once it gets to the folder
> its ascii, not hex.
> 

ASCII and Hex are not mutually exclusive of each other.  You seem to be
confused, so I will elaborate.

Hex is short for "Hexidecimal" which is a way of writing/representing
numbers.  Hexidecimal is base-16, unlike our traditional "decimal" method
which is base 10.    

In other words, counting in Hex would be  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F
10 11 12 13, etc.

Whereas in "decimal" (the representation you're probably used to) you only
have 10 values per digit, so you count like this:  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13, etc.

ASCII on the other hand is a lookup table to translate numbers to other
symbols.   Computers can only think in numbers -- so they needed a way to
tell a computer to correlate certain numbers with letters, punctuation
symbols and other characters.    ASCII is one such way.   For example, 
65 (or 41 in hex) corresponds to the letter 'A' in ASCII.   Since this
E-mail message is being written in ASCII, each time I type a 'A' the
computer translates it to a 65, stores it in memory, sends it to you,
where your computer sees the 65, and prints an 'A'.

So PC's, UNIX, and just about everything except IBM mainframes and
midranges use some permutation of ASCII.    AS/400's and IBM mainframes
use another coding scheme called EBCDIC.   In EBCDIC the number 193 is
used to represent an 'A' (that would be hex C1)

So what you're probably trying to say is that data written to a PC folder
needs to be in ASCII, not EBCDIC, or the PC won't be able to read it.

Naturally, however, there are ways to translate between the two.  the 
QDCXLATE API, the iconv() API, or writing your own table to translate
EBCDIC to ASCII are just a few. 

I hope that this has been informative.



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