Re: Reading IFS bin file into an RPG variable -- RPG400-L


On 22/01/2006, at 3:16 AM, Kyle Collie wrote:

If I do a wrklnk on  an IFS file, I see this:

GIF89a    ÷     ÿÿÿðíîGFG...

But in debug, my temp variable contains this:

åñã  /    7        0ÒÓåãå      x¿ÝzÞ^xÐÞ   ~xzwÝ(r)       (í ...

Not nearly the same.

What am I missing? If is a codepage issue?


At least three things:

1) Your code is doing a binary read. What makes you think WRKLNK isdoing the same?


        2) This output:
                        GIF89a    ÷     ÿÿÿðíîGFG...

tells me you are viewing the contents of a GIF image file. GIF filesare binary but use ASCII code points. The fact that WRKLNK (really DSPFfile but ...) shows the characters GIF89a on your green screen in anEBCDIC CCSID tells me it is converting the data otherwise thecharacters wouldn't be recognisable. Thus DSPF is converting from theCCSID of the file (probably 819) to the CCSID of the job (probably 37)and is doing so, probably, because it opens the file using O_TEXTDATA.

3) Debug always shows the contents of variables using CCSID 65535(described in the help text) which means no character conversion isperformed. It shows the raw content of the variable.

When viewing data in binary you can only rely on the hexadecimal codepoints of each character. From the above 3 points you can see that thedata in debug is the correct output. The data in DSPF has, probably,been converted from ASCII to EBCDIC.

Using the F10=Display Hex option in DSPF will show you the hex data.This should match the hex output in debug.

NOTE:- On 530 DSPF shows the real Hex data from the file content. Onsome earlier releases DSPF would show the Hex values of the convertedoutput which is not much use at all.

NOTE:- On some early releases DSPF only shows Hex output when using a24*80 display device. It will not show hex output in wide-screen(27*132) mode--also less than helpful. I see this "oversight" has beencorrected in 530. I don't know in exactly what release they fixed this.


Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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