Unicode or Ascii file formats on UNIX.

[maheshs]

Hi,
We are migrating data files from IBM mainframes to flat files on UNIX.
The data on Mainframes contains Arabic characters and IBM uses it's own propritory code pages to store data on the mainframe.

We are planning to store data on the UNIX server in the UNICODE or ASCII format.
We have a tool which does this conversion from Mainframe to Unicode/Ascii.

Our question is how do we maintain the file formats on UNIX server.
How Will the programs like vi understand if a file is in UNICODE format or ASCII format?

Is there some setting or environment variable which does this?

Please revert back.

Regards,
Mahesh.

 

[Ogzilal]

Hi,

Is All the application will reside on unix server or there will be a client side application and only the server part will be on unix ?

I think files that contains arabic charcetrs are datafiles managed by the application programs, so these files cannot be accessed or modified by vi or some equivalent text editor.

Some our french files are coded in ISO-8859-1 and stored on unix in ASCII.

Arabic characters may be coded in in ISO-8859-6 on the client side ( if there is a client side ) and stored in unix in ASCII mode

Google search ISO-8859-6 for more infos

Ali

 

[maheshs]

Hi,
Well the desktops are all running windows XP and the files (they are
basically archived data from an IBM Mainframe) will be on UNIX.
We connect to the Unix server using the Windows Telnet or Reflections
terminal emulator.
Will we have to do some setting on the emulator to view the Arabic of French
characters?

How do things work at your end? Do you never see the French characters?
Do we need to so some settings as the OS level to ensure that the certain
ISO encoding is used while viewing such files?

Please revert back

Thanks and Regards,
Mahesh Sankpal.

 

[fredericofonseca]

french chars are easy to deal with. Arabic I don't know.

vi, at least in recent *nix versions, will understand everything the other internal *nix programs will.

Without knowing more about your setup, and the way your application works its kind of hard to give you full details, but you will need to look at saving your files into the correct iso charset as aau mentioned.


What Unix vendor and version will you be using? this is important as each one has it's own way of configuring telnet sessions for diff charsets.

Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd

http://www.syssoft-int.com