Re: Jobs that use 65535 CCSID... Why?

On Tue, Jan 4, 2022 at 9:21 AM Brad Stone <bvstone@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In another thread on the RPG list the job CCSID of 65535 came up. Niels
called it the "no translation" CCSID.

It made me think of a question I've been wondering about for a while. Why
is this CCSID used? I've never seen it do anything but cause translation
errors when working with stream files or sockets.

Most if not all of the other respondents have been talking about
QCCSID, which is the "system CCSID".

This is NOT the same thing as the job CCSID.

The job CCSID comes from the user profile it's running under, or the
CHGJOB command.

By default, user profiles have the system CCSID, but this is not
always the case. Indeed, I suspect that many (most? nearly all?) shops
that leave their system CCSID at 65535 define their user profiles with
a reasonable CCSID instead.

This is what our shop does. Virtually all our ***JOBS*** run with
CCSID 37, even though our system CCSID is 65535. And in most contexts,
the job CCSID is consulted before the system CCSID.

This is not to say people shouldn't pick a better system CCSID. Just
clarifying that what you asked about (job CCSID) is not necessarily
what everyone else is talking about (QCCSID).

John Y.