Change in carriage control characters after migration from V12 to V14
Article ID: 7501
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
We have a REXX program that interpret carriage control from a file taken thru an IDEAL batch .That program ended in the past with RC0 but now is ending with RC04
Is this a change in IDEAL behavior ? We are attaching here the differences that we found.
Environment
Cause
The difference in the Carriage control characters is caused by RECFM=FBA versus RECFM=FBM
Meaning difference between ASA (FBA) characters and MCC (FBM).
- ASA Control Characters
ASA control characters are logical printer commands. They tell the printer how far to advance the paper before printing the current line of text. ASA control characters are all displayable characters. Printers do not understand these characters themselves, therefore the printer driver must translate them to the corresponding printer commands when sending the print data to the printer.
- IBM Machine Control Characters
Machine control characters, in contrast, are the very commands which IBM line printers understand. This is why they are hardware dependent or hardware determined. IBM defined this set of commands for their line printers and made sure all their line printers understand them. Other (mainframe) line printer manufacturers also had to make sure their printers understood those commands. Since machine control characters are hardware commands, many of them are not displayable characters and therefore machine control characters are always specified as hexadecimal values.
see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Machine_Code_Printer_Control_Characters
Resolution
In Ideal this is controlled by the batch file table IDSYSFT.
If you want MCC use RECFM=FBM, if you want ASA use FBA in the PSSPRTnn table entry.
BROWSE *.IDEAL14G.INSTJCL(ILCUS01) - 01.01 Line 00
Command ===>
*----------------------------------------------------------
PSSPRT01 ROSFD DDNAME=SYSPRINT,ACCMETH=SEQ,RECFM=FBA, LRECL=133,BLKSIZE=1330
PSSPRTnn.....
You need to change accordingly and asm/link IDSYSFT macro to customize as needed.
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