From: Jeremy Hinegardner <jeremy@...>
Date: 2007-05-11T02:57:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Trouble using string.tr()

On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 01:54:36AM +0900, Todd Burch wrote:
> Here's another twist.
> 
> If I set
> 
> instring = 0xF1.chr + 0xF2.chr + 0x4B.chr + 0xF3.chr + 0xF4.chr
> 
> which is ebcdic for "12.34", I get "45.67" in ascii.   It looks like 
> something (  tr() maybe?  ) is swallowing characters.

Have you tried just funnelling the data through some other tool?  For
instance on *nix there's dd(1) which will do the conversion for you.  Or
GNU's recode[1] which will take care of it, and the both take stdin and
stdout parameters.

I know you are on a windows machine, but if you have cygwin or the gnu
utilities for Win32 you should be able to take care of it via a system()
or %x{} call in ruby.

Here is a sample OSX version using Open3.  

    > cat ebcdic2ascii.rb
    #!/usr/bin/env ruby

    require 'open3'
    DD="/bin/dd conv=ascii"
    RECODE="/opt/local/bin/recode EBCDIC..ASCII"
    INPUT= 0xF1.chr + 0xF2.chr + 0x4B.chr + 0xF3.chr + 0xF4.chr

    dd_output = nil
    Open3.popen3(DD) do |stdin,stdout,stderr|
        stdin.write(INPUT)
        stdin.close
        dd_output = stdout.read
    end

    recode_output = nil
    Open3.popen3(RECODE) do |stdin,stdout,stderr|
        stdin.write(INPUT)
        stdin.close
        recode_output = stdout.read
    end

    puts "#{"%10s %10s %10s" % %w(EBCDIC dd recode)}"
    INPUT.size.times do |i|
        e = "0x%02x" % INPUT[i]
        puts "#{"%10s %10s %10s" % [e,dd_output[i].chr,recode_output[i].chr]}"
    end

    > ruby ebcdic2ascii.rb
    EBCDIC         dd     recode
      0xf1          1          1
      0xf2          2          2
      0x4b          .          .
      0xf3          3          3
      0xf4          4          4

 
Some old ruby-talk[2] postings talk about using Iconv but that the code
sample in the msg doesn't seem to work anymore

enjoy,

-jeremy

1 - http://www.gnu.org/software/recode/recode.html
2 - http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/scat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/66280

-- 
========================================================================
 Jeremy Hinegardner                              jeremy@hinegardner.org