Thanks Bruce.
I reckon you hit the nail on the head. Someone I was working with here was under the impression that in the absence of the encoding declaration in the header Biztalk would assume UTF-8, and that therefore it was trying unsuccessfully to convert my document from some other unknown encoding into UTF-8.
My document is apparently in UTF-8 and all I had to do to make it work was put the UTF-8 encoding in the header to let Biztalk know what to do with it.
Greg
|-----Original Message-----
|From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-
|bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bruce Vining
|Sent: Friday, December 12, 2008 6:40 AM
|To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
|Subject: Re: Character Encoding
|
|I am totally unfamiliar with MQSeries from an actual usage point of
|view, but if you want to determine the encoding that is currently in use
|then:
|
|
|send a message of known contents to the MQSeries queue
|dump that entry (or the whole queue if there isn't an entry specific
|mechanism provided by MQ) in hex
|
|If you can then post the original message and the dumped message it
|should be a snap to determine the encoding being used. Please make sure
|the message does contain extended Latin-1 characters such as the Ñ as
|that will provide an easy codepoint to distinguish between CCSIDs 819
|and 1208.
|
|Based on your reported results of using Notepad and specifying 8859-1 I
|suspect however that you are indeed using UTF8 encoding. The reason is
|that in UTF8 the Ñ would be encoded as x'C391' which, if processed
|as 8859-1 (CCSID 819), would be treated as à followed by an undefined
|code point (8859-1 reserves x'91' as a control) with who knows what
|graphic character.
|
|So I suspect (again out of a certain amount of ignorance) the real
|question comes down to what this Biztalk is keying off of in order to
|understand the encoding of the message. It does not appear to be
|1208/UTF8...
|
|Bruce
|Bruce Vining Services
|507-206-4178
|
|--- On Thu, 12/11/08, Fleming, Greg (ED) <GFLEMING@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
|wrote:
|
|From: Fleming, Greg (ED) <GFLEMING@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
|Subject: Character Encoding
|To: "Midrange Systems Technical Discussion" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
|Date: Thursday, December 11, 2008, 2:54 PM
|
|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.
|
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