RE: Local characters encoding problem

Perhaps with iconv API you could always force the input to the same
"regional setting" and thus only maintain one version of code?

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/v5r2/ic2924/info/apis/iconvopn.htm
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/v5r2/ic2924/info/apis/iconv.htm
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/v5r2/ic2924/info/apis/iconvcls.htm

Not sure, but it may be worth a try.

Elvis

-----Original Message-----
 Subject: [C400-L] Local characters encoding problem

Having a very unpleasant problem with scrambled local characters in program
call input parameters.
Maybe someone can advise me of how to solve it.
PC program makes a call to a AS/400 program passing some parameters as a
unsigned char array, that is actually a packed structure. So it contains
bytes, some of which are actually chars, some are numbers. PC has always one
and the same local settings.
Probably my 3 AS/400 have different "regional settings". Result is that
depending on the particular machine I must use 3 different manually built
encoding tables.
We have only 8 local characters, so building this table itself is not a
problem. But the problem is managing 3 different versions of the same
program, that work on particular machine.
For exampl I have letter Ä (capital A with 2 dots above it) that comes to
one machine as 0x0A and to another machine as 0x24.
So on one machine I must have a code row :

for (i = 0; i < 20; i++)
  if (Buffer[i] == 0x0A) ;
    Buffer[i] = 'Ä' ;

and on another machine :
for (i = 0; i < 20; i++)
  if (Buffer[i] == 0x24) ;
    Buffer[i] = 'Ä' ;

Stupid, isn't it?! Is there a chance to find some proper AS/400 parameter,
may be some system variable or whatever, that can be tested in order to
select proper comparison right side?

Should say here, that I understand, that probably correct way is to take
care of this encoding is to push it to PC side, but this is not an option
for certain reasons...

TIA,
Jevgeni Astanovski