XCOM z/OS to Windows EBCDIC file transfer gives UTF-8 or ANSI encoding
Article ID: 276394
Updated On:
Products
Issue/Introduction
Experiencing some problems transferring EBCDIC files from XCOM for z/OS v12 to XCOM for Windows v11.6.
The same job transfers 2 different EBCDIC files and after they arrive on Windows one has a file encoding (codepage) of UTF-8 while the other has a file encoding of ANSI
What triggers XCOM for Windows to determine that one file is UTF-8 and the other file is ANSI? It is required to force the file encoding to be ANSI (ASCII)
Environment
XCOM for z/OS to XCOM for Windows
Resolution
If CODE=EBCDIC is specified for the transfer under XCOM for z/OS then on file arrival XCOM for Windows will see the corresponding parameter CODE (CODE_FLAG) set to EBCDIC and automatically do a byte-conversion to ASCII (ASCII is a 7-bit character set which is a subset of the 8-bit character set ANSI).
After further testing, it was found that XCOM is actually working correctly and the file contents impact the behaviour.
Whenever the file contains no characters in dispute between UTF-8 and ASCII, the resulting file on Windows has encoding UTF-8 by default, that is opening it with Windows Notepad would show UTF-8 bottom right.
Without changing anything in XCOM or the transfer process, after testing sending a file with a Latin character Ñ the resulting file on Windows has encoding ANSI, that is opening it with Windows notepad would show ANSI bottom right.
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