Re: reading writing UTF files with BOM

Are you sure this is even a problem Jim - or are you assuming it will be?

I had this issue many years ago and IBM put out a PTF that made the IFS I/O system recognize the presence of a BOM and automatically ignore it. I have never had a problem since.


Jon Paris

www.partner400.com
www.SystemiDeveloper.com

On Jul 26, 2017, at 11:08 AM, Jim Franz <franz9000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Our problem is we have no control over the source of our input files - some
are processed via cpyfrmxxx commands, some are read from the ifs (some RPG,
some java, where the pgmr never handled extra bytes (BOM) up front. Have
not tried a BOM encoded file in cpyfrmxxx so not sure if will handle it.
We get files from other systems (mostly nix, win) but also getting input
from user downloads from web portals, and that is where we are finding the
issue. Training can only go so far - I tried explaining "encoding" to a
manager -
I guess we will have to "pre-inspect" the data before processing...
Someone wrote some java code a decade ago to parse some of the files and
all we got was "unknown exception..."
Jim

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 9:40 AM, Charles Wilt <charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Seems unlikely....

If there was some external characteristic that could be shown, then you
wouldn't need the BOM in the first place.

I suppose IBM i in particular could watch as the file is written, then
update some non-standard attribute. But I'm pretty sure that doesn't
happen.

Heck the non-standard CCSID attribute is just a promise to the OS made by
the user. The OS doesn't assign it.

Charles

On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 6:55 AM, Jim Franz <franz9000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Is it possible to tell (from an OS command or api) that a UTF encoded

file

has BOM characters before reading the file?
For those not familiar with BOM -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

Jim
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