EBCDIC was (still is?) the standard coding scheme used by IBM mainframes.
If the original datasets were actually created on punch cards (rather simply
being "card image"), there's a reasonably good chance they are coded in
EBCDIC. It's important to know, but not a major problem to deal with since
there are mapping schemes to translated between EBCDIC and ASCII.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of R. Allan Reese
Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2003 1:38 AM
To: statalist
Subject: Re: st: data formatted on cards
Let me offer a couple of keywords to watch out for - like Indiana Jones
watching for spears jump out of walls.
The last time I dealt with card image data, years ago on a reel of tape
written years before, the codes on the tape were MULTI-PUNCHED binary.
In other words, each "column" on the card had been used for a 12-digit
number that might encode several variables. Another variant used on cards
was EBCDIC rather than ASCII character encoding. This was an early
version of PGP :-)
R. Allan Reese Email: [email protected]
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