Hi,
I am porting the gnu libiconv to z/OS so that people can use it as an alternative
to the iconv that is shipped with the operating system.
There are 2 key functions that are really nice in the gnu libiconv that are not
available in the z/OS version:
- the //TRANSLIT option
- more code pages supported.
I have hit an issue where the conversion for EBCDIC SBCS conversion is not
consistent between the two utilities, and am wondering if:
- this has come up before
- there is interest in providing consistent behaviour
I have comparisons for the various code pages, but if we look at the most
common code page conversion, it is likely IBM-1047 to/from ISO8859-1.
Here is what I see:
Convert from IBM-1047 to ISO8859-1: compare open source iconv to IBM z/OS iconv
21 205 12
37 12 205
Convert from ISO8859-1 to IBM-1047: compare open source iconv to IBM z/OS iconv
133 25 45
The numbers are the output from 'cmp -l' so the output is read as:
<byte-number> <byte value file 1> <byte value file 2>
z/OS is not the only platform that has EBCDIC files. IBM i also uses EBCDIC
as does z/VM, z/VSE.