I have been given a set of COBOL DAT, IDX and KEY files and I need to read the data in them and export it into Access, XLS, CSV, etc. I do not know the version, vendor of the COBOL code as I only have the windows executable that created the files.
I have tried Easysoft and Parkway ODBC drivers but I have not been successful in reading the data from the files.
I do not have access to the source code as the company that was distributing this product shut down.
I have successfully read some of the dat files using http://www.cobolproducts.com/datafile just now which I came to know through another forum. Most probably I will work with them to help me read the rest of the files that I am having an issue with.
A few possibilities.
1/ See if you can find the names of the people that worked for the company. They may be helpful.
2/ Open the DAT file in a text editor. The data may be decodable from that. If the basic format can be discerned, quick'n'dirty code can be written to extract it.
3/ Open up the executable in an editor, there may be strings in there that indicate which compiler was used, then you can search for info on its file formats. If it's a DOS application, there's a good chance it was either Microsoft or Fujitsu COBOL.
4/ Consider placing job requests on work sites like elance or rentacoder; I don't think there's a cost if the work can't be done successfully.
5/ Hire someone to examine it and advise on the likelihood of recovery.
6/ Get a screen dump of the record contents for every active record and re-construct it from that.
Some of these are pretty hard so your mileage may vary.
Good luck.
I have read COBOL DAT files only with FD, when I do not have the FD, I open the file in a Text Editor, and try to guess the columns, and try again, until I have this working, the big problem with this approach is when the DAT file have COMP columns, that can be any kind of COMP type, but with a litthe patience I cold get this done.
I had tryed Parkway ODBC, but without success.
for anyone going through this journey, I found this in sourceforge: Cobol and RPG data reader and converter
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cobol2j/
Im about to try it, sounds kind of promising
Related
INTRO:
I'm in a situation because when uploading an inventory upload feed to Amazon, in 2021, they still don't understand UTF-8 encoding.
Here we have a file, in a wordpress installation, as the image for a visual product.
Example url : https://wordpresssite.com/uploads/Café-à-la-crème.jpg
Wordpress displays it fine.
Amazon reads a bunch of gibberish and can't find the file and gives an error.
Can we leave the file name on the source server as is and yet do something in cPanel or in
the excel file that lists this URL in a way that Amazon can also read it?
Is this ultimately as simple as telling Excel to encode that column differently before uploading?
Thank you in advance!
UPDATE : What I am trying now, is to export the Excel to CSV and then run it through line by line using PHP with a combination of tricks hoping to do a passable job of it. From what I see, there are many ways that "sorta" work, but nothing is sure.
UPDATE 2 : I realize that this doesn't solve my problem, because if Amazon changes the file name, changing an "é" to an "e", then it won't find the image either, so I'll have to go through all the images and find the ones with accents that I'm using.
QUESTION ABOUT PROCEDURE : I haven't been able to quite understand the way things work. I thought originally that this is about trying to get help when stuck. I have explained the problem and code isn't necessary. If I'm wrong, please tell me how it changes THIS situation? I'm using Excel, WordPress and I have to lose the UTF-8 accented characters that seem to cause Amazon's systems such grief (no judgement to Amazon, except that this resistance to UTF-8 is giving me brain shudders at the moment).
MORE INFO: If this helps, I'm writing in English but certain art products have a lot of French and some German in their names. I thought my example sufficient to illustrate what I was up against.
My problem is not how to convert the code but how to put the steps together to do what I need. It's because this whole process is not a simple iconv vs utf_decode() in php that it's extra stressful. Once I get the big picture sorted, the smaller steps are written about in many places where I could find more specifc details if I needed.
I'm not snarking here, but it seems that this kind of comment is just kicking someone when they are down. You are not the first to make such a suggestion over the years but again, I am curious how I could have explained any more than I have already — in a way that pertains to my actual problem.
Thanks for your response.
That URI is not properly encoded as per RFC 3986 (see also Wikipedia: percent/URL encoding). You cannot expect a server to blindly assume a requested URI to be UTF-8 encoded, but you can expect every server to support percent encoding:
https://wordpresssite.com/uploads/Caf%C3%A9-%C3%A0-la-cr%C3%A8me.jpg
In PHP this can be achieved thru rawurlencode(); in JavaScript it would be encodeURI().
Not sure what you want with Excel and CSV, but from what I understood it is unrelated to your actual problem.
Assume I have sensitive information (passwords, private keys,...) that I saved to a file which I encrypted.
Is there an easy to use tool to convert back and forth between a small file (say 0.5kB) and an image (QR code?) that I can print out to have a safe backup?
You can use LaTeX with the ps-tricks and pst-barcode modules, it produces nice QR codes, and yesm we used it exactly for this purpose: Paper backup of SSH private keys.
Denso Wave of QR code developer distributes software on their site.
Membership registration on the site is required to obtain it.
Even if you can not print with this, there are various tools regardless of free/commercial, so please search.
The maximum amount of data that can be stored in the QR code is 2953 bytes in binary mode.
However, it depends on the ability of the scanner to use.
QR code FAQ #6 Can an image or sound be stored in a QR Code?
I wrote a linux program to do this, called qr-backup.
In researching similar programs as part of it, I discovered a number of alternative projects as well. All of these are also linux-only.
asc2qr.sh
paperbackup. Focused on GPG/SSH key backup. See also the paperkey preprocessor, to reduce the size of keys.
qrdump (incomplete)
qrpdf
If your file is very small (0.5KB is a good cutoff), you can generate one single QR code. An example command-line program to generate it is qrencode. Several web converters are also available.
About 3 years ago, I was looking for a way to allow a web app user to download table results to an Excel file. I knew that I didn't want to put Office on the web server and that I probably wanted to create the XLS file in XML format. The question was: what was the best way?
Now I am writing my resume and I am trying to recap the things that I did and I am concerned that I didn't take the best approach and I am wondering if somebody can tell me whether my suspicions are true.
Basically, I saved an Excel file as XML and then looked at the contents of the saved file and reverse engineered what I thought was a pretty cool SDK to create an Excel file in XML format. It was fairly robust with options , nice object model, etc.
But did such a library already exist? One that I could have used? I want to know if I will need to defend this "accomplishment"
Also, could anyone recommend me a good place where I can see actual resumes of people with .NET / SQL Server or general developer skills?
You can try SmartXLS (for Java or .Net), it supports most features of Excel (cell formatting, Charts, formulas, pivot tables etc), and can read/write both the Excel97-2003 xls format and the Excel2007 openxml format.
These people wrote a perfectly good one that you probably couldn't implement yourself for as cheaply.
I need to manuplate an excel sheet workbook (add sheets/ add data/ hide columns / protect cells with password / change fields contents/ etc etc)
should I use the COM objects provided by microsoft (but then i think they have few problems being used in asp.NET)
or is there a good (commurcial or free) library / plug in to be used for doing this kind of activity.
please help
try spread Sheet Gear third party component
http://www.spreadsheetgear.com/
The easiest way I've found is to use the Excel XML format. That way you can edit an Excel sheet like any other XML file. To see how Excel hides columns or protects them with a password, do those things manually and see how Excel saves them as XML. This is a breeze to code up, it's rock stable, and it's fast.
Manipulating native Excel files is harder: you can use the COM objects with the primary interop assemblies. In my experience this is very hard to get right. In the best case, Excel leaves old copies of itself around, which you can mitigate with a scheduled nightly server reset. In the worst case, Excel will randomly hang, making your web site unresponsive.
Another way to work with native Excel files is Visual Studio Tools for Office. It's certainly easier to use than COM interop, and works best from Visual Basic:
Application.Workbooks.Open("Workbook.xls")
C# lacks optional parameters, and opening a workbook becomes something of a bad joke:
Application.Workbooks.Open(#"Workbook.xls",
missing, missing, missing, missing, missing, missing, missing,
missing, missing, missing, missing, missing,missing, missing);
I didn't dive very far into VSTO because XML manipulation worked so well for me. Maybe other people can comment on how it works out in an ASP.NET website.
With SpreadsheetGear you have complete access to the Excel doc and all of the macro capability including the ability to protect and un-protect cells, columns, etc. We have the same thing you are describing except in WinForms.
We have used the COM objects and I cannot recommend it. On big problem is that the objects never get released...
We now use the component from Gembox software. Have used it for two years and works OK, it's a little cheaper that the one metioned above, which I didn't know before seeing it here.
I thought this was asked before, but 15 minutes of searching on Google and the site search didn't turn anything up...so:
Where can I obtain free (as in beer and/or as in speech) dictionary files? I'm mainly interested in English, but if you know of any dictionary files, please point them out.
Note: This question doesn't have a right/wrong answer, so I made it community-wiki. However, I feel that it might be valuable to not only myself, but anyone who wishes to implement or use a spell checker with various dictionary files.
I have found a SourceForge project called Word List, which appears to have a number of dictionaries. I have downloaded a couple and am currently checking them out.
On Linux you can look in places like /usr/share/dict/words
I would presume that OpenOffice contains dictionaries for several languages.
I don't know what your target platform is but here is a solution that is for VB.NET. It uses the Office libraries which Office in itself isn't free but if your users are all internal and have Office then you could leverage these libs. There is a zip file with the example source code you can download as well.
Check spelling and grammar
There is what appears to be a half-decent dictionary available for free here on CodeProject.com (registration required unfortunately).