> The mainframe character set isn't ASCII but rather ??EBCDIC??. > Using binary mode transfer would not work unless the two character sets > matched or a translator was written. > It just seems that we could save a lot of heartache if we simply purchased > a file transfer system with the capabilities we require instead of us > having to write a translator. > > Brad C'mon, the translator can be written in fox within one hour. I wrote one in FP1.02 for sake of some data transfer. It simply takes one 256-byte string and a sys(15) function, or two 256-byte strings and a ChrTran() function. Open the source file low-level and read it in portions of, say, 4K or so and write them into another file, like this: in_handle=fopen(source_file) out_handle=fcreate(dest_file) do while !feof(in_handle) buffer=fread(in_handle, 4096) =fwrite(out_handle, chrtran(buffer, ebcd_string, ascii_string) endd close all ascii_string should contain chr(0)+chr(1)+...+chr(255), ebcd_string should contain corresponding characters in EBCDIC, or vice versa.