Page 1 of 1

Read sequential file encoded with WE8DEC / DEC-MCS

Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2013 1:13 pm
by bashbal
I need to load a sequential file that is encoded with character set WE8DEC, but I don't see that listed in the available maps on the NLS tab of the sequential stage properties.

I've found out that WE8DEC is the same as DEC-MCS. I did some research and found that ISO-8859-1 is very similar, but differs in 3 printable character positions and 15 others that are undefined in DEC-MCS.

Does anyone know if one of the other DataStage maps are equivalent to WE8DEC (DEC-MCS)?

FYI - The source of the sequential file is and older verion of SAP/BW that is NOT enabled for Unicode. The SAP techs told me that BW sits on Oracle database with NLS_LANG set to WE8DEC and that Open Hub will write files in Raw or binary mode. That is why I believe the file is DEC-MCS encoded. I can't tell just by looking at it.

False Alarm. File is ISO-8859-1

Posted: Mon Sep 30, 2013 10:58 am
by bashbal
The Basis team told me that the sequential files are created with SAP code page 1100, which is actually ISO-8859-1 and not DEC-MCS after all.

Now that I have finally received some files for testing, I have been able to load them using ISO-8859-1 map without any conversion errors. So, there never was a problem.