There is no such thing as "French Unicode." That is the "uni" part and the beauty of Unicode.
There are several flavors of Unicode, but they relate to how the code points are stored in a file or transmitted, not to the character set. All of Unicode is something like a million possible characters (someone will no doubt correct me with the exact number in use). Plain old ABC, "French" letters like ô, symbols like €, it's all there in one big Unicode. Every letter is always the same, whether you are in America or in France. Now, how do you represent that in a file or whatever? Well, you could use 32 bits for every character. Not very efficient, but certainly straightforward. That is called UTF-32. It's not very common. You could use 16 bits for every character, with some sort of cleverness that yielded two 16-bit words when you had a code point bigger than 65535 (actually somewhat less due to how the cleverness works). That is called UTF-16. Pretty good but still not very efficient. You could use 8 bits for most characters, with cleverness that expanded that out to two or three bytes for more obscure characters. Pretty efficient, and you could make the first part of the character set the same as ASCII, which would make it intuitive for PC folks who "know" that A is X'41'. That is called UTF-8, and it's pretty good and pretty popular as a result. Most Web pages are in UTF-8 and I believe this e-mail came to you in UTF-8. Okay? Now, define "keep it intact." Do you mean bit for bit intact, or do you mean "so that when I open it up in ISPF, what looked like an A on the PC now looks like an A in ISPF"? If the former, you want a binary transfer, end of story. If the latter, you don't really want to keep it intact, you want to translate Unicode -- and you will need to know which flavor of Unicode encoding (not what country) -- to EBCDIC, which is what ISPF and most COBOL programs expect. Comprende? Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Scott Ford Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2014 4:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Subject Unicode All: I have a fundamental question on Unicode, or more of how it works . I am confused about the following scenario.. PC ( data using a foreign language Unicode page, like French ) going to z/OS and being keep in tact. Names and address type data. As the application do I have to query the incoming data and find out what the Unicode CECP is then translate to the desired ? or how does it work ? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
