The Pervasive Data Parsers are the tools to use for parsing flat data files where there is only partial or no internal metadata. These flat files originate from mainframe (iSeries, AS/400, z/OS, z/VSE, CICS, HP 8000, and others), mini (DEC, HP 3000, Data General, Wang 2200, and others), and personal computers (MS-DOS, Windows, Linux, and UNIX) in obscure proprietary formats for which there is limited or no access. They often contain EBCDIC encoded data and require special handling to convert EBCDIC to ASCII.

Source Side

The Data Parsers support reading data from these semi- or un-structured flat files and provide a graphical interface in which you can manually define the record layout and field definitions. Alternately, if you have access to a dictionary file that contains the record layout and data definition, each Data Parser includes dictionary file support that is appropriate to the source data format. The Data Parser reads the external dictionary file - such as a COBOL copybook, ASCII record structure, Btrieve DDF, etc. - and auto-parses the data file into data records and data fields. Support for EBCDIC to ASCII conversion and ASCII to EBCDIC conversion, unicode and other international encodings (UTF-8, UTF-16, double-byte, multi-byte, etc.) is included in all of the Data Parsers.

Each of the Data Parsers can parse and convert fixed-length data files as follows...