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Agreed completely, I recently had to work with some EBCDIC output files from old mainframe systems. Packed string data in a fixed delimited file. Nail bitingly frustrating stuff.

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Having built countless similar conversions, EBCDIC[1] to ASCII can be as simple as a lookup table and "packed string data" is just binary coded decimal [2] with a sign.

What is a fixed delimited file? A 'mainframe' file is generally fixed length or delimited.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal

I have used delimiters within a fixed-width file so that I can fit more data in a width field in a fixed-width file layout. This is usually when I have to work with a mainframe, and can't define the layout, of course.

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