Re: XML Translation Problem

Hiya Michael,

XML doesn't require you to use an entity reference for Unicode characters. Provided you are using a Unicode encoding, you can just put the character in the document, unescaped.

The problem most people run into (whether escaped or not) is that EBCDIC simply doesn't contain one of the characters in their XML. (This includes your "greater than or equal" character... it doesn't exist in any flavor of EBCDIC that I'm familiar with. (And it's not alone... there are perhaps 300,000 characters that exist in Unicode but aren't available in ASCII or EBCDIC.)

So, you can have RPG parse it into a UCS-2 (another Unicode) field, and it should work nicely. But, as soon as you try to convert it to EBCDIC (for example, to display it on a 5250 screen, or save it to an EBCDIC field in a database, etc) you'll have a challenge to overcome. This is where you might do a find/replace (as Henrik suggests) to convert the character to something else.

If you store it wholly in Unicode fields (UCS-2, UTF-8, UTF-16, etc) then you'll be okay. You could even send it back out in an HTML, XML, JSON, etc document, and be fine. However, experience has shown that on IBM i, folks usually need to convert it to EBCDIC at some point, and that's where things go awry.

-SK


On 9/5/2012 12:30 PM, Michael Naughton wrote:
>
> I'm generating the XML in a Lotus Domino agent on a Windows server
> (very much like a Visual Basic environment). Basically, right now I'm
> sending everything with an ASCII number greater than 127 as a &# ...
> string.
>