Re: EBCDIC and COBOL records

[NetWallah]

The CPAN module will help with the (poorly named) FILLER-ASCII field. (There is a chance that the data is already 7-bit ASCII stored in 8-bit chunks)

The other 2 "COMP" fields will need to be better defined:

Comp (Computational)
Comp (with no suffix) leaves the choice of the data type to the compiler writer. The intent of this data type is to make it the most efficient format on any given machine, which is usually some binary format. Because of this, comp varies greatly between platforms, more than most other types.

This means that the COMP field, which is probably binary-numeric has a size that varies with the hardware and compiler.

Your best bet is to use a system utility on the original harware to get a hex dump of a few records, then write code to deal with it. The last 2 words(likely to be 32-bit chunks) of the record probably correspond to the last 2 fields.