ISPF edit, file tagging and ASCII conversion

[David Crayford]

We recently had a problem where a customer using a German codepage 
(IBM-273) used the ISPF editor to edit a z/OS UNIX file tagged 
ISO8859-1. The ISPF editor translated the file to EBCDIC (don't ask me 
why it does that. I much rather it stay in ASCII). Anyway, it was a YAML 
document and they added a @ character to the end of a comment line. When 
ISPF saved the file it incorrectly converted the @ character to a 
section sign §. This caused a YAML parse failure as the Java SnakeYaml 
library expects UTF-8. We could tag the file UTF-8 but that opens a can 
of worms. UTF-8 is not well supported in z/OS UNIX. Setting 
_BPXK_AUTOCVT=ALL breaks most programs that use enhanced ASCII. I'm of 
the opinion that the ISPF editor is not using the ZTERMCID to determine 
the code page to translate and is probably only supporting 1047. This 
isn't documented. Can anybody shed any light on this?

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN