PSF/AIX: can all carriage control characters be defined in ASCII?
ITEM: RTA000107549
Q:
ABSTRACT: Can all carriage control characters be defined in ASCII
and be automatically converted to EBCDIC when sent 2 MVS
SEARCH ARG: carriage control ascii
TOPIC THREAD: PRINT
PSF/AIX
..
My customer needs to create output using carriage controls and TRCs that
print in PSF/AIX but will also convert and print properly when sent to
MVS in the future. I have read several items that imply this can happen
but only seem to talk of no space (+), 1 SPACE ( ), 2 SPACE (0), 3 SPACE
(-) AND SKIP TO 1 (1) that are ANSI defined. Can the other channel skips
be also used i.e skip to 2-12? Will the TRC's be converted to a usable
form when sent to MVS? This assumes ASCII codes in AIX to convert to
EBCDIC codes in MVS. Is this the correct way to do this so data will
print properly in both environments.
Q:
Sorry, but I now remember what made this issue particularly difficult.
They need to include 5A carriage controls to call in shaded column
headings dynamically on a page. When these are sent to MVS how will
the 5A carriage controls remain the same and the others convert to
EBCDIC? Or does PSF/AIX use the ASCII equivalent of a 5A to signal
PSF/AIX that this is a control record?
A:
How are the jobs to be sent to MVS? Will the customer be using AFP
Upload, I hope? If so, the conversion from mixed mode data (ASCII plus
X'5A' records) to AFP would take place on the RS/6000; then the
resulting AFPDS would be sent in binary mode to the MVS host and
submitted to print to PSF/MVS. The TRCs and carriage controls would
be processed in this way as well as long as the carriage controls are
ANSI or Machine; you can't have a mixture of X'5A's and ASCII form feeds
(X'0C'). The apka2e input record exit of ACIF, which converts from
ASCII to EBCDIC, has the logic to ignore records that begin with X'5A'
and only convert the other records in the file. (Note that the asciinpe
input record exit of ACIF does *not* have this logic; it assumes that
all the records are ASCII.)
If they're considering a manual transfer, then we need to discuss
further. PSF/AIX uses X'5A' records in EBCDIC mode as structured fields
just like PSF/MVS--even within an ASCII data stream; it's REALLY "mixed"
mode¢ I don't know of any way (without running it through ACIF with
inpexit=apka2e first on the RS/6000) to get a mixed ASCII and EBCDIC
data stream up to the host where only the ASCII records are processed by
the translate tables while the EBCDIC records are ignored. Their
alternative would be to produce their data records in EBCDIC rather than
in ASCII so that the entire file would be EBCDIC.
Please reopen with any additional questions.
S e a r c h - k e y w o r d s:
psf/6000 psf/aix acif ansi carriage control ASCII structured
field 5A TRC cc EBCDIC apka2e psf/mvs upload mixed asciinpe psf aix mvs
WWQA: ITEM: RTA000107549 ITEM: RTA000107549
Dated: 01/1999 Category: XPSF6000
This HTML file was generated 99/06/24~12:43:35
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