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

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From: "Pierre Goyette" <pierre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 18 Nov 2004 14:53:17 -0500
Guy,

Yes, there are a number of places where this can be enabled and I'm sure
you would put this in the best place.

Regarding your question about code pages, the issue also applies to
ASCII. I'm sure you are aware that ASCII actually only represents 0 ->
127. So, for 128-255, what code page determines the glyph to be
dispalyed?  PC 437? Windows Latin-1 1252? ISO Latin-1 8859-1?

The same applies to EBCDIC.  What does 0x5B mean? With Open Systems
Latin-1 1047, it means the dollar sign '$'. With the UK CECP 1080, it
means the pound sign.

Therefore, it would be nice to be able to specify the character set used
to display the data in the Packet Bytes pane. 

I don't know if Ethereal is single-byte or Unicode. If it is SBCS, then
you need tables to convert from a selected host code page to the target
display code page (1252 for Windows). If Ethereal is Unicode, then you
need tables to convert from the host SBCS to Unicode.

Tables exist for all of these conversions. If you need help on this
side, I'd be glad to furnish the expertise...

Regards,

Pierre

-----Original Message-----
From: ethereal-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ethereal-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Guy Harris
Sent: Thursday, November 18, 2004 1:48 PM
To: Ethereal user support
Subject: Re: [Ethereal-users] Enhancement Request - Display as EBCDIC

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?

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