ftp'ing special characters from mainframe to HPUX10.20

[Kofi ARTHIABAH]

Hi All:

I am wondering if any of you have encountered this kind of situation:

We have some data on a mainframe (native EBCDIC) that have accented characters (ie. French characters) in them. We need to get these files off the mainframe with ftp onto our HPUX 10.20 box, however, the characters that arrive are completely different from what they are on the mainframe. Here is a list of things I have tried:

0. tried transfering data as binary, it did not work
1. Set the LANG=fr_CA.iso885915 and tried ftp'ing (first to a file, and next to the screen with "-" but did not work)
2. Tried ftp from a Wintel box with the same results.
3. Tried setting ftp type to ebcdic, once we were logged in on the mainframe and it failed.

I guess the question is, is there a way to move data with special characters from a mainframe to a unix box and maintain the characters?

An alternative I am considering, is to map out all the characters on the mainframe side and find out what they translate to when they get to the unix side, and then use tr to convert the data. (obviously, the problem with that is what happens to unexpected translations?)

Anyone? Thanks in advance.

Kofi

[Antoanetta Naghiu · Accepted solution]

What about going in serial and using kermit? Did you try?

[Tom Danzig]

dd can translate ebcdic to ascii and vice versa. Perhaps conversion to ascii -> ftp -> coversion to ebcdic might work?

Tom

[John Palmer]

Does the mainframe ftp software have any options for altering the way in which it does the EBCDIC to ASCII translation?

[John Palmer]

Binary transfer from the mainframe to HP then dd with conv=ascii or conv=ibm may also be a possibility.

[Anthony deRito]

Kofi, you may want to check out document ID
W3592918.

Tony

[James R. Ferguson]

Kofi:

A suggestion is to write a custom translation table (routine) on your mainframe wherein you translate EBCDIC to EBCDIC and the one or two special characters in question to some character of your choice. You can use FTP to translate EBCDIC to ASCII when you push it to the HP server, or perhaps its better to convert the EBCDIC file to ASCII while still on the mainframe and then do the FTP. In either case, knowing positionally where your special character(s) occur may help you translate (re-map) the chanracter(s) once on the HP server.

...JRF...

[Kofi ARTHIABAH]

Thanks to everyone who responded. The kermit solution is very promising... I am in the process of automating it.

once again, thanks all!