As of z/OS 2.1, ISPF supports UTF-8, so a binary transfer will still show an A 
if it
was an A on the PC. I don't know which emulators will show all the other 
bazillion
glyphs though...


In article <[email protected]> you wrote:
> 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 ?, 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 ?

-- 
Don Poitras - SAS Development  -  SAS Institute Inc. - SAS Campus Drive
[email protected]           (919) 531-5637                Cary, NC 27513

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