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How To Determine Encoding Of A File - And see the contents in Hex

thread209-1819217

How To Determine Encoding Of A File - And see the contents in Hex

How To Determine Encoding Of A File - And see the contents in Hex

(OP)
I have a .dat file and would like to know if the format of it is ASCII, EBCDIC or whatever.

What is a simple way of knowing the format of the file.

I have looked at properties, tried Visual Studio but it say I need an app to open a .dat file.

Bottom line - I would like to know the format but would also like to look at hex values in the file.

I'm in a distributed environment so do not have the Mainframe Fileaid product available to me.

So, just assume I have a file on my Windows computer called myfile.dat and I want to see the contents of it in hex and would like to know its encoding.

Thank you.

RE: How To Determine Encoding Of A File - And see the contents in Hex

Notepad++ has a built-in that shows the hex-level values. Try it.

Frank Clarke
--America's source for adverse opinions since 1943.

RE: How To Determine Encoding Of A File - And see the contents in Hex

As a COBOL programmer, using the free editor SPFLite can be of much help. See http://spflite.com/

It is a mainframe look-alike editor with all kinds of commands, file profiles, .....

Also there is an old utility RCOPY from Computer Associates that can concert EBCDIC into ASCII and the other way around. It is very fast. It is free.

SPFSE365 is/was a commercial program that works excellent, has build in utilities to do all kinds of conversions. I am not sure if any representative can be found to buy it. 😥

I agree about notepad++, nice tool, but not typically helping for COBOL.

tell us how you are doing.

RE: How To Determine Encoding Of A File - And see the contents in Hex

for looking at all type of files including mainframe files and with possibility of using COBOL copybooks layouts (and a lot more) see https://sourceforge.net/projects/record-editor/

for pure hex viewing look at https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/ -- this is a must have tool for any developer.

Regards

Frederico Fonseca
SysSoft Integrated Ltd
www.syssoft-int.com

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