Re: New system CCSID recommendation

[Simon Coulter <shc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Saturday, February 14, 2004, at 03:54  AM, M. Lazarus wrote:

>  I don't think that we have to go as esoteric as PASE.  Doesn't Client 
> Access File Transfer default to 66535?  What if I was to use the 
> create file option and forget to change the CCSID on the xfer and the 
> default system ID was 437?  Would there be mass confusion when native 
> pgms tried to use that file?

Client Access does not default to 65535. It uses QCCSID (eventually) 
but since almost no-one sets QCCSID properly the file transfer ends up 
using 65535 which results in EBCDIC data at the PC. You can always tell 
this because EBCDIC data displayed on a PC using an ASCII editor will 
show a lot of commercial-at signs (@). These generally have ASCII 
code-point x'40' which in EBCDIC is the space. Therefore EBCDIC spaces 
show as ASCII @ signs.

The Convert CCSID 65535 flag in Client Access is a kludge to compensate 
for customer systems not being set correctly (and also because few 
customers understand the complexities of character encoding and can't 
fathom why the data downloaded to the PC looks like crap so they blame 
the transfer and not their wrong environment).

I said it was not possible to have a job using an ASCII CCSID (except 
in PASE or possibly by using 65535 but processing data as if it were 
ASCII). You cannot set QCCSID or a job CCSID to 437 (or any non-EBCDIC 
value). Therefore the only way to get data incorrectly interpreted is 
by doing something wrong. You can send ASCII data to the host and have 
ASCII data interpreted as EBCDIC if the host uses 65535 and you neglect 
to use the Client Access kludge. There are other ways too.

In this case the file would have ASCII data that was interpreted as 
EBCDIC. It is certainly possible to have files using any valid CCSID. 
If files are being transferred between systems that use different 
encoding methods and that encoded data is stored in a file which says 
the data is something else such as 37 when it's is 437 or 65535 when it 
is not raw data then YES you will have a learning experience (except 
most won't of course--they'll just blame the system and not their own 
ignorance).

Regards,
Simon Coulter.
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