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?