How to read EBCDIC data with a non standard codepage, and not mess up numbers?

Question

Here is one for the old(er) hands :-)

I\'m reading a binary dump from a mainframe DB2 table. The table has varchar, char, smallint, integer and float columns. To m

Answer 1

@Hans Passant is correct. If you are reading a file that contains binary data (as your discription indicates), then it is incorrect to read the file as though it were text.

Fortunately, the BinaryReader class includes a constructor that takes a character encoding as one of the parameters. You may use this to automatically convert any Hebrew EBCDIC strings in the file to ordinary Unicode strings without affecting the interpretation of the non-text (binary) portion.

Also, you should probably use the two-byte VARCHAR length field to read your strings instead of just throwing it away!

The ReadString() method will not work in this case, since the file was not encoded with the .NET BinaryWriter class. Instead you should get the length of the VARCHAR (or the hard-coded length of the CHAR field) and pass that to the ReadChars(int) method. Then construct your resulting string from the character array that is returned.