Ethereal-users: Re: [Ethereal-users] Enhancement Request - Display as EBCDIC

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:47:39 -0800
Pierre Goyette wrote:
There are a number of us who need to trace and analyze traces from IBM
systems such as S/OS and OS/400 where the data on the wire is EBCDIC and
not ASCII.

Some products out there such as the older NetXRay and Sniffer allow you
to right-click on the Packets Bytes pane and 'Display as ASCII' or
'Display as EBCDIC'.

Could Ethereal be enhanced such that when you Right-Click on the Packet
Bytes pane,

...or select the appropriate menu item from the View menu (at least one UI guideline says that items available from context menus should also be available from the main menu)...

two menu options are added:

	Display as ASCII
	Display as EBCDIC

Or a single menu item "Display as" with "ASCII" and "EBCDIC" submenu items.

This option could be in the preferences so that it doesn't need to be
done for each packet.

Or in the "recent" file, so that it remembers the last setting done.

I can provide the master IBM tables to use to translate the data from
ASCII to EBCDIC for most code pages.

We already have a table used elsewhere to display data as EBCDIC (which actually involves translating from EBCDIC to ASCII, given that all the platforms on which Ethereal runs are ASCII-based). You might want to check the tables in "epan/charsets.c" to see whether they're doing the right mapping.

When you say "code pages", is that referring to DOS code pages (which are extensions to ASCII) or to EBCDIC code pages, and would "Display as EBCDIC" have to be "Display as EBCDIC code page N" with multiple menu items for multiple code pages?