Packed decimal problem

[verify]

We are having an EBCDIC file which is being created by mainframe system. We wuld like to know the following things on that.

1) Generally the amount fields would be packed as "123456}". It is just an exaple. But when there is a " " in the EBCDIC file, what does it mean? IS the input value is NULL? and What would be the packed decimal value if in case the input value is NULL.

2) How should we need to handle such NULL decimal values of the EBCDIC file?

Can anybody help in this regard as we have a serious issue on this.

Thanks.