Character Encoding

I hope I can ask this question in a way that makes sense.

I'm trying to get my head around character encoding and CCSID's with regard to data being transferred off of the iSeries.

We send orders in XML format to an MQSeries queue, and use Microsoft Biztalk to pick those up from the queue.

If we include characters like Ñ, Ü, etc, Biztalk doesn't recognize them and chokes.

We are NOT specifying the encoding in the XML header, so it is apparently defaulting to UTF-8.

Using notepad, I altered our document to include the encoding in the XML header and tried ISO-8859-1, which allowed the document to go through OK, but the character was changed from Ñ to something else that looks like an 'A' with a tilde on top, and a square box following that.

I read on a website that randomly assigning ISO-8859-1 could solve an immediate issue, but might cause different issues later if my document isn't actually ISO-8859-1 encoded.



If I leave the message on the MQueue, and browse it using the MQueue Explorer, the Ñ is still intact, so I don't think the translation from EBCDIC to ASCII is actually causing the problem. It seems that the issue is telling Biztalk what kind of encoding the document is actually using.



So the meat of my question is this: How can I tell what the actual encoding of the document is ? Is there a correlation between the IBM CCSID (37 for the job that is sending these messages to the queue), and the resulting PC encoding ? Or is there a system value on the iSeries that determines what encoding a document will have when the iSeries translates it from EBCDIC to ASCII ?



Thanks



Greg Fleming

Senior Programmer/Analyst

Everglades Direct, Inc.