CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonibm-cloudmainframeebcdic
bil mason
bil mason

Reputation: 11

Save EBCDIC string to a file - Python

I am trying to write this EBCDIC string(ÑkÀ*) to a file. I want to save the exact string in the file but whenever i try saving it, it adds extra characters to the file and the byte count is 6 bytes(2 hidden characters added) instead of 4 bytes(ÑkÀ*).

Note: i have 6992645 which was converted to hex(6992645C) and later to EBCDIC(ÑkÀ*) so I can send it to mainframe. I need the exact EBCDIC string(ÑkÀ*) in the file so IBM mainframe can read it and convert it to hex as 6992645C.

def encode_ebcdic(input_str):
    # taking of COMP-3 Identifier and removing the 0 that makes it even
    if 'F' in input_str:
        input_str = input_str.replace('F', '')
    if '0C' in input_str:
        input_str = input_str.replace('0C', 'C')

    print("Hex:", input_str)
    # Convert the hex string to bytes
    input_bytes = bytes.fromhex(input_str)
    # Decode the bytes using EBCDIC encoding
    ebcdic_str = input_bytes.decode('cp037')
    # Return the decoded string
    return ebcdic_str

def write_to_file(output_str):
    with open('output.txt', 'w') as f:
        # Write output to the file
        f.write(output_str)

input_string = "F69926450C"

Python Output

Upvotes: 1

Views: 396

Answers (1)

Tim Roberts
Tim Roberts

Reputation: 54733

What you are doing is converting the hex value to EBCDIC bytes, then converting the EBCDIC back to Unicode, then writing the Unicode to file, wherein it gets converted to UTF-8.

You should not worry about EBCDIC here at all. All you need is to write hex bytes to a file. It's up to the reader to interpret them. So, just convert the hex to bytes, and write the bytes to a BINARY file (mode 'wb'):

def encode_ebcdic(input_str):
    # taking of COMP-3 Identifier and removing the 0 that makes it even
    if 'F' in input_str:
        input_str = input_str.replace('F', '')
    if '0C' in input_str:
        input_str = input_str.replace('0C', 'C')

    print("Hex:", input_str)
    return bytes.fromhex(input_str)

def write_to_file(output_str):
    with open('output.txt', 'wb') as f:
        # Write output to the file
        f.write(output_str)

input_string = "F69926450C"
write_to_file(encode_ebcdic(input_string))

Output:

timr@Tims-NUC:~/src$ hexdump -C output.txt 
00000000  69 92 64 5c                                       |i.d\|
00000004

Naturally, you will not see "ÑkÀ*" in the output file, because your terminal (and mine) doesn't speak EBCDIC. 0x69 is only Ñ if the terminal is EBCDIC. With our ASCII terminals, 0x69 is "i".

Upvotes: 2

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