RE: special characters issue in xml

> From: Ray Nainy
> 
> Thank you Scott.
> 
> I'm certainly reading a stream file in EBCDIC format but, how can you
tell
> whether a file is in ASCII or EBCDIC or any other format?

You can tell what it is SUPPOSED to be by looking at the CCSID (coded
character set identifier).  You can see this using DSPBOJD or WRKLNK.
You can also see it in OpsNav.  For example, 37 is an EBCDIC CCSID,
while 819 and 850 are ASCII CCSIDs. 

Also note that the CCSID is not necessarily the same as the code page,
which is what encodings are called in the PC world.  I'm still a little
unclear on this one; CCSID 819 and 850 seems to be the same as code
pages 819 and 850, but after that it gets a little confusing.


> I wonder do we really need these many types of formats?
> If yes, how many known formats do we have in our small world?

Yes, nowadays.  How many are there?  Tons.  For example, all data in
Java is stored by default in Unicode, which is actually a 16-bit
encoding.  Browsers accept varying code pages, including basic ASCII
data as well as UTF-8 and UTF-16.  It gets very important in i18n (the
web world's cute abbreviation for "internationalization"), because many
Asian and Middle Eastern languages require multi-byte capabilities, and
that will always require a non-standard code page.

We just DBCS-enabled our PSC/400 product, and that required
understanding the native EBCDIC double-byte CCSID, 5026, as well as some
standard code pages in the PC world, SJIS (Shift-JIS) and ISO-8859.

Are you confused yet?  You should be.

Joe