ASCII-EBCDIC Translations

When connected to IBM host (mainframe) FTP sites it may be necessary to transmit and receive files using the EBCDIC character set. If so, Robo-FTP supports the translation of ASCII to EBCDIC to files sent to the FTP site and from EBCDIC to ASCII on files received from the FTP site when IBM Host Features mode is enabled.

EBCDIC transfers may be configured as the default file transfer mode for a given FTP site or may be specified using the /type=ebcdic option on the SENDFILE and/or RCVFILE script commands.

Robo-FTP has built-in translation tables that have been proven with time to be correct in most situations. However, there may be times when one or more character translations may not be correct for a given application.

The Robo-FTP package includes a utility program named NewXlat that may used to create alternate translation table(s). This utility uses a file named ‘xlat.tbl’ (which contains an image of Robo-FTP’s default tables) as input and creates a new file. This file may then read using the READXTBL script command to override Robo-FTP’s built-in translation tables.