The record is made up of multiple fixed-length fields.  I guess the field in 
question technically didn't overflow.  But rather it "expanded" the field by 
one byte, pushing every other field one byte to the right.  Likely the program 
that creates the file is treating the "field length" as the number of 
characters, rather than the number of bytes.  I've actually asked them to 
create the file as ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8, and if they're willing/able to 
do that then this entire discussion is moot.  But I wanted to have this as a 
backup solution.

________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of 
Paul Gilmartin <0000000433f07816-dmarc-requ...@listserv.ua.edu>
Sent: Monday, November 16, 2020 10:55 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU>
Subject: Re: FTP converting between UTF-8 and EBCDIC

On Mon, 16 Nov 2020 17:26:12 +0000, Frank Swarbrick wrote:

>Yes, it "overflowed" a fixed-length field.  x'C3A1' in the source file was 
>treated as two separate "ASCII" characters, x'C3' and x'A1'.  Since those 
>don't exist in the EBCDIC code page I am using they just get converted to two 
>"nonsense" characters.
>
How wide is that field?  You must have been on the bitter edge of the limit.
What happens if a client enters an actual surname exceeding the limit?

>I agree that ideally the input source would restrict the input.  But since 
>that's on another team, and this workaround is likely "good enough", that's 
>probably unlikely to happen.
>
What was the workaround you chose, converting to which EBCDIC CCSID?
Is there no possibility of a client's entering a character not in that CCSID?
What happens if someone does?  Can you fuzz test or would that intrude
"on another team"?

I'd expect you need to do some filtering, perhaps to preclude SQL injection
downstream.  But that might be achieved by encoding.

(I guessed wrong: "á", not  "â".  Spellcheck flags both.)

-- gil

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