Access - sort characters in EBCDIC

[DaveTO]

Can Microsoft Access sort a field by EBCDIC instead of ASCII? If so, how?

 

[MichaelRed]

I do not think I'v seen any reference / uee of EBCDIC in any dialect of BASIC . That being said, as far as I know, VB doesn;t know the 'origen of whatever it sorts, so the sort itself should work. Since it has been way more longer than even I want to contemplate since I used it, I have NO recollection/memory/residual knowledge of the sequence of characters, so am totally unsure of how the results would "look" to a user.

The only alternative I see would be to build a crossref function to copy the EBCDIC characters to ASCII characters, sort the ASCII stuff and then reverse translate back to EBDCIC. Of course, then you would ned to shop hte results back to the archaic system which still uses EBDCIC and have it display the results to even begin to see if it was all "O.K." Since the results would only be useful in the EBDCIC system anyway, why not do the sort there?




MichaelRed
m.red@att.net

Searching for employment in all the wrong places

 

[RickSpr]

I agree with Michael, you should sort on the mainframe. However, I disagree that the sort would work, or specifically, that the sorted data would have any meaningful order. The EBCDIC text characters are all above hexadecimal 80, which means they'd be interpreted as special symbols and accented letters. The accented letters would get ordered according to their unaccented forms, which would ruin the ordering.

Rick Sprague
Want the best answers? See faq181-2886
To write a program from scratch, first create the universe. - Paraphrased from Albert Einstein

 

[DaveTO]

Michael, Rick

Thanks for shedding some light into this problem of mine.