Expert: Concise Systems/Laird Scranton - 8/3/2007

Question
Hi,
Actually I want to migrate some data containing English as well as Greek characters from AS400 to mainframes. I have downloaded data from AS400 using standard 'Data Transfer From AS400' utility provided with 'IBM AS400 Client Access Express' in ANSI format and then I am using FTP job with SYSFTPD parameters as :

DBSUB FALSE
ENCODING MBCA
MBDATACONN (UTF-8,UTF-8)
UNICODEFILESYSTEMBOM NEVER
UCSHOSTCS IBM-939
UCSSUB FALSE
UCSTRUNC TRUE

English characters are being migrated properly but not Greek data.
Can you please suggest something.
Regards,
Vatish

Answer
This is not really my area of expertise.  However, as you do the file transfer, the system tries to translate EBCDIC characters to ASCII, and it recognizes the English letter bit configurations and converts them to counterparts in ASCII. My guess is that in the default translation table English characters have been coded for conversion to ASCII counterparts, but the Greek have not, and so it is interpreting the Greek character bit configurations as data, not letters.  Most AS/400 file transfer methods offer you an option to transfer without EBCDIC/ASCII translation, but this would leave you with a PC file coded in EBCDIC, which would then require a custom-written PC conversion program. Or, it is possible that an alternate translation table may already exist on the AS/400 for both the English and Greek characters.  If so, you might be able to specify that as the translation table to be used for your file copy. If you send me your e-mail address, I will research this early next week on a client's AS/400 and let you know what I find out. My e-mail address is concisesys@aol.com

- Laird