How do I do ASCII to EBCDIC translation in Ruby?

Question

I am using Ruby 1.8.7 on Mac OS X.

How do I convert ASCII to EBCDIC encoding, to communicate with legacy system. Would I have to use to jruby?

Answer 1

You should use the Ruby iconv library (for Ruby versions before 2.0) or the iconv gem (for Ruby 2+) specifying EBCDIC-US as the codeset:

irb(main):001:0> require('iconv')
=> true
irb(main):002:0> x=Iconv.new('EBCDIC-US','ASCII')
=> #
irb(main):003:0> x.iconv("foo")
=> "\206\226\226"