You could also use the text editor VEDIT (www.vedit.com). It allows you to view a document using a variety of translations from the hexadecimal.
1. Load the file as normal (it will still look like garbage as the default is ASCII)
2. Use the View -> Toggle Display Mode menu option (or Alt-d) about 8 times until it gets to EBCDIC mode (the current mode is displayed in the lower left of the app window).
3. You will probably need to set how many lines are in the line length. This information should be with whatever data dictionary you got, if not it is easy enough to find it by experimenting.
4. Then save it using the WYSISYG conversion option of the file menu.
There is a description of this whole process in the help menu.
If you have a large amount of similar files, I would (and do) use SAS to convert them. VEDIT can not handle packed decimal, so you need to use SAS there as well.
-Tim
-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel Feenberg [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2004 4:39 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: st: Converting from EBCDIC to ASCII
On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Daniel Egan wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> I have a huge dataset which is in EBCDIC that I need to get into
> Stata. I have been told that I can do this using SAS as an
> intermediary, translating from EBCDIC to ASCII.
We use SAS often for this, especially where the EBCDIC data includes
packed decimal or zoned decimal data. In that case, SAS is the only
package we have available (Bill Gould, please take note). A disadvantage
of SAS is the 200 character limit on character variables, which means you
have to divide the record up into chunks and translate each separately.
> Does anyone have any experience with this, or can point me towards a
> generic translator? I just want to see if there is any easier way than
> SAS.
The dd command in Unix can do this conversion for most situations. The
chief problem we have noticed is that non-EBCDIC values in the input data
are dropped with no placeholder substituted. If your EBCDIC dataset is
fixed format, and (for example) missing fields are packed with nulls (very
common), the result will be a shorter and unusable dataset.
The command is:
dd conv=ascii <ebcdic.in >ascii.out
or
dd conv=ibm ...
I don't really know the difference between the two conversions.
Daniel Feenberg
feenberg isat nber dotte org
>
>
> Cheers, and thanks,
>
>
> Dan Egan
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