3.4. Translating from ASCII to EBCDIC

Almost all network communications use the ASCII character set, but the AS/400 natively uses the EBCDIC character set. Clearly, once we're sending and receiving data over the network, we'll need to be able to translate between the two.

There are many different ways to translate between ASCII and EBCDIC. The API that we'll use to do this is called QDCXLATE, and you can find it in IBM's information center at the following link: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/pubs/html/as400/v4r5/ic2924/info/apis/QDCXLATE.htm

There are other APIs that can be used to do these conversions. In particular, the iconv() set of APIs does really a good job, however, QDCXLATE is the easiest to use, and will work just fine for our purposes.

The QDCXLATE API takes the following parameters:

And, since QDCXLATE is an OPM API, we actually call it as a program. Traditionally, you'd call an OPM API with the RPG 'CALL' statement, like this:

         C                   CALL      'QDCXLATE'
         C                   PARM      128           LENGTH            5 0
         C                   PARM                    DATA            128 
         C                   PARM      'QTCPEBC'     TABLE            10
     

However, I find it easier to code program calls using prototypes, just as I use for procedure calls. So, when I call QDCXLATE, I will use the following syntax:

         D Translate       PR                  ExtPgm('QDCXLATE')
         D   Length                       5P 0 const
         D   Data                     32766A   options(*varsize)
         D   Table                       10A   const
         
         C                   callp     Translate(128: Data: 'QTCPEBC')
     

There are certain advantages to using the prototyped call. The first, and most obvious, is that each time we want to call the program, we can do it in one line of code. The next is that the 'const' keyword allows the compiler to automatically convert expressions or numeric variables to the data type required by the call. Finally, the prototype allows the compiler to do more thorough syntax checking when calling the procedure.

There are two tables that we will use in our examples, QTCPASC and QTCPEBC. These tables are easy to remember if we just keep in mind that the table name specifies the character set that we want to translate the data into. In other words 'QTCPEBC' is the IBM-supplied table for translating TCP to EBCDIC (from ASCII) and QTCPASC is the IBM supplied table for translating TCP data to ASCII (from EBCDIC).