The problem you are running across is a common one for people who work in
languages other than English.  It stems from the fact that historically
different platforms defined the positions for characters outside the 7-bit
ASCII character sets differently.  The way glyphs (the graphical
representation of a character) map to their numeric representation is called
an "encoding scheme".  The HP3000 uses Roman-8 as it's encoding scheme, and
Windows (by default) uses a variation on the ANSI Latin-1 encoding scheme
called WinLatin-1.  As a side note, DOS uses yet a different encoding scheme
(PC-850) if you're set up as a Canadian-English or Canadian-French user.

Most FTP clients know nothing about encoding schemes and just transfer files
as is (except for translating CR/LF to LF or vice-versa if it's an ASCII
transfer).  The IBM ftp clients on AIX machines are smart enough to
translate to and from EBCDIC (yet another encoding scheme) when transferring
to and from mainframes.  Unfortunately, I don't know of any such ability
built into HP's ftp clients.

It's a trivial (if tedious) task to write a program that translates between
Roman-8 and WinLatin-1.  All one needs is the tables for the two encoding
schemes.  You read in a character at a time and write out it's equivalent in
the new encoding scheme.  The table for Roman-8 can be found at
http://www.hp.com/cposupport/printers/support_doc/bpl02461.html.  A table of
the ANSI Latin-1 encoding scheme can be found at
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Orchard/8550/Others/chartab.html.
The ANSI Latin-1 table is missing some of the Microsoft extensions, but it
should be good enough for what you want.

I hope this helps,
Rob

> ------------------------------
>
> Date:    Wed, 10 Nov 1999 10:06:50 -0500
> From:    "Pickering, John (NORBORD)" <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: FTP and french accents
>
> I have a file in which some of the fields contain mixed case text items
> en
> fran=E7ais with accented characters. Using FTP to put this on an NT =
> server
> results in junk - tried binary, tried ascii, no luck. OTOH, Refection =
> file
> transfer has an option on the setup screen, WRQ tab titled 'transfer =
> link'
> which, when set to 7 bits, allows the deconstruction and subsequent
> reconstruction of the accented characters. Is there any way to =
> accomplish
> this with FTP? The file will be moved regularly, is quite big and is =
> created
> in the middle of the night in batch -- I would much rather use FTP than
> fiddling with Reflection.
>
> John Pickering
> Toronto
>
> ------------------------------