If you � Unicode, you’ll ����� EBCDIC

One of the projects I’ve been working on over the past few months is the Dynamic Scripting feature pack for CICS. It runs on z/OS, which is an interesting environment for a few reasons – not least because it’s an EBCDIC platform.

Know your charset

A character set defines which byte value is used to represent a given character. So the choice of character set is a concern that should crop up whenever raw bytes are interpreted as character sequences, or character sequences are converted to raw bytes. For example, care should be taken to use the correct character set when writing text to a file, or reading character data from the body of an HTTP response.

Often, it’s tempting to ignore the concern. The vast majority of