RE: Possible dumb question: ASCII, EBCDIC, or Unicode?

>
> I'm sure it's sockets ... but I'm not sure of the internals
> of how it's received.

Do you have the source code for this?  If not, there might be some
method call or Properties or something to set the expected character
set.

> So if a iSeries based java program received text in ASCII,
> via a socket, and converted it to a String  or byte array, it
> might not be able to understand the contents of the data
> without explicitly declaring the character set?

Remember the text is received into a byte array.  If that happens to be
in ASCII, which is probably is, and the program says to convert that to
Unicode but interpret the bytes as if they're EBCDIC, then the
conversion will not be properly performed.  The statement

  String myString = new String(socketByteArray)

will assume that the byte array contains ASCII on a non-iSeries machine
but EBCDIC on an iSeries machine.  So, the safest way when dealing with
these things is to explicitly declare the character set used in the byte
array.  If you don't do that, the JVM will assume ASCII on a windows
machine but EBCDIC on an iSeries.

You can override this by changing the system property file.encoding but
this will affect all of your I/O, not just the socket.  If you have the
source code for the the FlexLM stuff, I can show you where to correct
it.  Otherwise, you'll have to get the vendor to fix this bug.

Does the vendor return the series of bytes to you or what?

Gary