Working with ASCII and EBCDIC

In hybrid IT environments, ASCII might not be the only format with which you will have to deal. In this section, you will learn to work with EBCDIC, a character set defined by IBM.

An Overview and a Short History of EBCDIC

ASCII is not the only character set available. Mainframe environments, especially IBM, use Extended Binary Coded Decimal.

Interchange Code (EBCDIC) is the default character set. EBCDIC is actually a family of 8-bit character sets and not a single character set. In books, people often refer to EBCDIC as one character set, but it isn't. Let's look at a short history of EBCDIC.

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