Re: excel=>ftp=>as400....columns?

[Pete Hall <peteh@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 00:06 07/31/98 -0400, Kmh0421 wrote:
>Can anyone help? I am FTP'ing an Excel spreadsheet to the 400. I convert it to
>a text file before sending, still I get a flat unparsed record. Must I write a
>program to parse the file on the 400? Or can I FTP an Excel spreadsheet into
>an AS400 file already parsed into fields?

Dear Kmh0421

If you can get Excel to produce a positional record (not tab delimited, CSV, 
etc, but really positional), you could FTP that to a file that you have built 
on the AS/400 with fields that exactly match the positional data, provided that 
there are no problems with signed data or numeric data, due to leading or 
trailing minus signs (you need to convert the rightmost character to the ascii 
representation of the ebcdic character that represents the last digit and a 
negative sign nibble, and remove any embedded decimal points and/or edit 
characters). I actually got desperate at one point and wrote a program that 
does that. If you're interested, it's available for free on my web site.

Or, you can use the CA file transfer, which knows about excel spreadsheets. 
Download a dummy record from your AS/400 file first (CA doesn't seem to like 
downloading empty files any more), in order to get CA to build the FDF 
(definition) file. I generally only use this to retrieve data from the AS/400, 
so I can't say for sure how reliable the upload function is. The last time I 
tried it (quite a while back in a land far away) I resorted to writing the 
little program I mentioned above, but big blue has improved CA file transfer a 
lot since then.

Either way, you need to build the receiving file on the AS/400, with the 
expected field definitions first.

Pete Hall
peteh@inwave.com 
http://www.inwave.com/~peteh/

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