At least its not actually still on punch cards...

Are you doing business with a computer history museum?

Ok. Enough smart-alec remarks, do you want me to look into this for you? Its probably not hard to write a custom program to manage this. Given the age of this problem, its not too likely you'll find a canned utility (but maybe).

I'll take a look at it. Send it to support, Ray will forward it to me.

Make sure you include any details I'd need, like where different formats begin and end.

I looked at your format. Converting the EBCDIC to ASCII is trivial. Every UNIX based OS comes with a utility that can do this. The difficulty comes with translating the packed decimals... well not so much the translating, that is also pretty easy and I could write script or program that does them one at a time, in less than an hour - but in finding them and inserting them back into the (already mostly translated) document in the right places. I could write a program that uses the format document to read in and translate, spitting out the final document in the same fields, in a few hours.

Basically, the difficulty is in the variation introduced by having 16 possible record types.

Were I to take this on, I would need to have a couple questions answered: does the after document have ASCII or actual binary numerics in place of the packed numerics in the original? I'd need to be able to check my work. I'd need a before and after of a small set of packed numerics.

And, given that this is likely to run into several hours or work, I would need to be able to bill your company for the time.

I may be cheaper to hire in the short run. But, I suspect that it would save a tremendous amount of money in the long run to get this company off of such archaic formats, languages, and hardware.

Are you positive that only one of the 16 formats will ever be used?

How are you translating the packed binary by hand? What format is the result of the packed binary? An ASCII representation of a numeric? A binary numeric?

I will get your email from Ray.

When you say "non-EBCDIC" values, do you mean the packed binary numbers?

Can you send me a small before and after (no more than two records)?

Which record type are they all?

It may be possible to do what you are doing by automating notepad++. Have you looked into that?

It looks like notepad++ has support for several scripting languages, most particularly Python.