convert EBCDIC String to ASCII format?

Question

I am having a flat file which is pulled from a Db2 table ,the flat file contains records in both the char format as well as packed decimal format.how to convert the packed data to a java string.is there any way to convert the entire flat file to ASCII format.

Answer 1

EBCDIC is a family of encodings. You'll need to know more in details which EBCDIC encoding you're after.

Java has a number of supported encodings, including:

• IBM500/Cp500 - EBCDIC 500V1
• x-IBM834/Cp834 - IBM EBCDIC DBCS-only Korean (double-byte)
• IBM1047/Cp1047 - Latin-1 character set for EBCDIC hosts

Try those and see what you get. Something like:

InputStreamReader rdr = new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(<your file>), java.nio.Charset.forName("ibm500"));
    while((String line = rdr.readLine()) != null) {
        System.out.println(line);
}

Answer 2

Read the file as a String, write it as EBCDIC. Use the OutputStreamWriter and InputStreamWriter and give the encoding in the constructor.