Re: Decode base64 to job CCSID?

English is aligned with UTF-8 up to the legible characters that do not have
accented, or tilde, characters.
Take into account this. When you need to accept Latin, accented or
tilded characters not part of the English language, UTF-8 will render two
or more bytes, depending on the language.
So, do not take for granted the size of the utf-8 variable just like the
*job ccsid variable.
If it is ALL ENGLISH, not a problem. When UNICODE was invented, ASCII
became a subset of UTF-8 and not the contrary.
For example, CODE PAGE 1252 (Windows Western something.....), it includes
some accented characters that are Latin, and their codepoints were changed
from the original ASCII set.

Give it a thought. I'd try what I suggested, or else, go more complicated
and use the iconv() API with which you can rest.

HTH

JS

El mié, 1 abr 2026 a las 12:15, Daniel Gross (<daniel@xxxxxxxx>) escribió:

Ah - yes - BASE64_DECODE returns a blob without CCSID (or better with
*HEX).

I solved this lately with a DS:

dcl-ds decoded qualified;
blob varchar(1000);
utf8 varchar(1000) ccsid(*utf8) samepos(blob);
end-ds;

exec sql set :decoded.blob = QSYS2.BASE64_DECODE(:encoded);
return decoded.utf8;

I think this works quite OK - you could of course do this also with some
pointer-arithmetic.

HTH
Daniel

Am 01.04.2026 um 19:53 schrieb Justin Taylor <jtaylor.0ab@xxxxxxxxx>:

If I specify the CCSID on retDecoded, I get SQLSTATE 42806 "Variable
RETDECODED not compatible or value too long.".


Example:
Dcl-s retDecoded varChar(1000) ccsid(*UTF8) ;

On Wed, Apr 1, 2026 at 12:32 PM cesco via RPG400-L <
rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You need to know what encoding the encoded in base64 was originally in.
then try to declare retDecoded with that CCSID

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