Hi,

I am using emacs in hexl-mode to edit binary print files wich have ebcdic text in them.

Emacs (21) does not seem to have an ebcdic coding system, and this makes the above rather cumbersome.

My question is
How can I write and install an ebcdic coding system in Emacs 21.4 ?


I viewed files like
/usr/share/emacs/21.4/lisp/international/latin-1.el
hoping that I could write my own ebcdic coding in one of them, but these seem to have code points over 160 only (lines like
(set-case-syntax-pair 166 182 tbl) ;latin letter h with circumflex) )

It needs to be emacs 21.4, so that I can use it at work.

Thanks for any tips.
Joram

I don't use Emacs, so I can't answer your questions. I often use okteta (a simple KDE hex editor) to edit EBCDIC text files.

Hi,

Pure ebcdic text files do not pose much of a problem. I just convert them using dd before editing and convert them back after.
The point is that these are binary print files, containing ebcdic strings. So, I cannot convert all of the file before loading into emacs. I need to change the hexl-mode's representation.

Cheers

Give okteta a try. It is a GUI raw file editor that displays the file in both hexadecimal and in text in separate parts of the window. It can display the text using any one of many different code pages that it supports, including EBCDIC. It just interprets the binary data in whatever code page you specify for the purpose of displaying it on the screen as an aid to editing, but it doesn't actually convert anything in the underlying raw file, so there is no risk of corruption to any of the data.

I think okteta is perfect for what you want to do.

I really don't know anything about Emacs, but I did find this info about an EBCDIC table on the Emacs wiki. Maybe it will be useful to you.