Charsets based on IBM

• ebcdic: EBCDIC codes
• ibmpc: IBM's PC code
• iconqnx: Unisys' ICON code

EBCDIC code

This charset is the IBM's external binary coded decimal for interchange coding. This is an eight bits code. The following three variants were implemented in GNU recode independantly of RFC 1345:

ebcdic

This charset represents the way Control Data Corporation relates EBCDIC to 8-bits ASCII. GNU dd ebcdic conversion is identical.

ebcdic-ccc

This charset represents the way Concurrent Computer Corporation (formerly Perkin Elmer) relates EBCDIC to 8-bits ASCII.

ebcdic-ibm

This charset is almost identical to the GNU dd ibm conversion. For the GNU dd ibm table, recode said:

Codes  91 and 213 both recode to 173
Codes  93 and 229 both recode to 189
No character recodes to  74
No character recodes to 106

So I arbitrarily chose to recode 213 by 74 and 229 by 106. This makes the ebcdic-ibm recoding reversible, but this is not necessarily the best correction. In any case, I believe GNU dd should be corrected, and preferrably, GNU dd and GNU recode should agree on the correction. So, this table may change once again.

RFC 1345 brings in recode 15 other EBCDIC charsets, and 21 other charsets having EBCDIC in at least one of their alias names. You can get a list of all these by executing:

recode -l | grep ebcdic

IBM's PC code

This charset is available in recode under the name ibmpc. There are a few discrepancies between this charset and the very similar RFC 1345 charset ibm437, which have not been analyzed yet, so the charsets are being kept separate for now. This might change in the future.

The file was obtained or is aimed towards a PC microcomputer from IBM or any compatible. This is an eight-bit code.

Unisys' ICON code

This charset is available in recode under the name iconqnx.

The file is using Unisys' ICON way to represent diacritics with code 25 escape sequences. This is a seven-bit code, even if eight-bit codes can flow through as part of IBM-PC charset.