Eric Thomas <ERIC@FRECP11>
Sat, 10 Oct 1987 13:56 SET
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Yes Mark. But you should be aware of the fact that some of the national
character set letters (accented characters, exclamation point, double quote,
square brackets, etc - characters which don't exist in all languages,
according to IBM's own private conception of foreign languages) are coded as
control characters. I had trouble explaining to a student why he should not
sign up with an "i trema" in his name, but with a regular "i". He could not
understand why this i trema could hang up a PC 3270 emulator, and why it
wouldn't display properly since the PC does have this character.
More seriously, I could modify LSV822TO to quote these characters. But what
the heck *is* an ASCII control character in EBCDIC? :-( This stupid standard
should have said "nonprintable character" or something like that. What are the
EBCDIC codes I should quote? X'00'-X'3F' can probably be considered control
characters, but what about all the stuff between I and J, R and S, etc? :-(
That's where IBM puts the accents usually. Wouldn't it be safer to just
translate all the 00-3F range to blanks? I'm wondering what a gateway might do
to these characters when bringing them into an ASCII world, and wouldn't be
surprised to see them turned into something making the mailfile invalid.
Eric
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