Comparison of two files in EBCDIC format

Question

Hi boarders..
I have a file which is there in ASCII format. I convert it to EBCDIC format using the below code
import java.io.*;
public class DcollType {
static String readInput() {
    StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer();
    try {
     FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream("CLR812AX_TST5000.txt");
     InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(fis, "ASCII") ;
     Reader in = new BufferedReader(isr);
     int ch;
     while ((ch = in.read()) > -1) {
          buffer.append((char)ch);
     in.close();
     return buffer.toString();
    } catch (IOException e) {
     e.printStackTrace();
     return null;
static void writeOutput(String str) {
    try {
     FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("ascii.bin");;
     Writer out = new OutputStreamWriter(fos, "Cp1047" );
     out.write(str);
     out.close();
    } catch (IOException e) {
     e.printStackTrace();
public static void main(String[] args){
String inputstr=readInput();
writeOutput(inputstr);
  Now once i produce this file, i need to compare this file, with another EBCDIC file.
This second EBCDIC file is got by converting the original ASCII file using Mainframe emulator tool.
I want the boarders help in wrting a code which will help me in comparing tw0 EBCDIC file's content byte by byte..

Answer 1

Eh? Just compare them. Since you're just comparing the bytes, you don't need a java.io.Reader; you just need a java.io.InputStream. (Or two, really.)
You've already shown you can handle this...just open two input streams, one for each file, and compare each byte, byte-by-byte. As soon as two bytes are not equal, you've shown that they're not the same. If you reach the end of both the files and all the bytes are the same, then they have identical contents (regardless of encoding).
Maybe you're being thrown by the encoding? It's really not relevant if you're just checking to see if the bytes are the same.