Re: DB2 UTF-8 fields used in RPGLE

Henrik,

It is still not clear to me what you are trying to achieve and why you are so adamant about UTF-8.

True, CCSID 1200 or 13488 don’t give you full Unicode support, but that has nothing to with UTF-8; it is UCS-2 that is limited to the Basic Multilingual Plane. If you need to go beyond that (Egyptian hieroglyphs? Playing cards? Mah Jongg? CJK Ideographs) you need something else; if not, datatype C is your friend. No iconv needed; just %char for UCS-2 to EBCDIC (with %status 50 telling you you have untranslatable characters) and %ucs2 for the other way round (and mostly you don’t even need the BIFs, just assign vice versa).

Joep Beckeringh


Op 13 jan. 2014, om 15:38 heeft Henrik Rützou <hr@xxxxxxxxxxxx> het volgende geschreven:

Joep,

CCSID 1200 or 13488 doesn't basically give you full unicode support in RPGLE
unless you base or result is UTF-8 and you use binary iconv to convert
between
the formats.

Iconv will do correct conversion of large characters (3-4 bytes UTF-8)
into 2*2 bytes UTF-16 CCSID 1200) since it is a "calculated" conversion
that isn't based on a translation table.

In other words you can calculate the hex conversion of the full unicode span
between UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32.

The problem is that these string conversions isn't natively supported by
RPGLE
as a field type, you have to use raw storage manipulation with iconv to
achive it.

Basically UTF-8 is a one byte string that shares x'00'-x'7F' with ASCII but
it
would be nice just to be able to move ingoing or outgoing UTF-8 directly
to/from
a field type without conversions.

UTF-8 can be converted to SBCS EBCDIC in two ways, on a "normal" iconv
CCSID 1208>37 that only will support the 256 characters in the SBCS EBCDIC
CCSID or on byte level.

At the moment I'm working on a replacement of powerEXT Core, a CGIDEV2
SBCS hybrid where a new middleware will have full Unicode,SBCS and DBCS
support.

My problem is that neither SBCS or DBCS "original" has that support in DB2
fields - unless I have overseen something.






On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 2:52 PM, <j.beckeringh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

Henrik,

What exactly are you looking for? Do you want to use Unicode in RPG or do
you specifically want to use UTF-8 encoding in RPG? Using Unicode is
simple enough through UCS-2 encoding (datatype C; CCSID 1200 or 13488 as
Bruce mentioned; implicit conversion by assignment or explicit conversion
by %ucs2 and %char).

Joep Beckeringh

Henrik Rützou <hr@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Re: DB2 UTF-8 fields used in RPGLE

Unless I have overlooked something the RPGLE UTF-8 field support is
more or less useless since it in reality only supports characters in the
jobs SBCS EBCDIC CCSID :-(

It would be far better that the DB just passed the data "as is bytes"
so it could be passed to either a the jobs SBCS EBCDIC field or to
a DBCS field by using a %BIF.

Why on earth didn't IBM not just copy the DBCS support to UTF-8
support? Maybe Barbara Morris can answer that question?

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Regards,
Henrik Rützou

http://powerEXT.com <http://powerext.com/>
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