search for: ibm037

Hi, I am trying to read in records from an old main frame file. Each record is 640 bytes. I had some success using the following statement: iconv(readChar(con, nchars=640, useBytes = TRUE),from="IBM037",to="",sub="#") What I have found, however, is that ocassionally a record will contain a Null halfway through, which causes readChar() not to read the rest of the record. It is a very old database (from the 1970s I think), and I am not really sure why the Nulls are there....