An update on this...
I've concluded that I haven't described iconv's behaviour correctly below.
In my defence, this is an incredibly confusing area to work in. What you see
is not always what it seems...
iconv does appear to be implementing some for of bidirectional algorithm and
I think it's doing it OK. But I would still like to know if the environment
variables implemented on z/OS are available on IBM i?
Thanks
Pete
"Peter Clifford" <peter.clifford@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:mailman.13032.1322386339.2520.midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx...
Hi. Wondering if anyone out there can help.
I am trying to convert some bidirectional text (a combination of Arabic
and English) to UTF16 and/or UTF8 using iconv and am getting
unsatisfactory results. The input data is encoded in EBCDIC 420. The
Unicode output is correctly converted, in terms of character-level
conversions, but it seems to me that the entire set of characters (both
Arabic and English) is reversed.
It's hard to describe what I mean, but it's as if:
EBCDIC 420: The TV station "areezajlA"
becomes:
Unicode: "Aljazeera" noitats VT ehT
which is correct so far as the Arabic is concerned, but not the English.
Now, I believe this means that iconv on IBM i is not implementing the
Unicode bidirectional algorithm http://unicode.org/reports/tr9/ which (as
I understand it) should allow iconv to recognize which parts of the text
are RTL and which LTR and handle them accordingly.
A bit of Googling led me to this:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/zos/v1r11/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.zos.r11.bpxbd00/iconvop.htm
which suggests that iConv on z/OS supports some environment variables
which can tell it to implement the bidirectional algorithm (I think).
So far, I can find nothing to indicate that these are supported on IBM i.
Anyone know?
Thanks
