On Thu, 22 Mar 2012 16:17:30 -0500, McKown, John wrote: >This may be another weird desire on my part. But I'm wondering why IBM does >not enhance the QSAM and BSAM access methods to support the OPTCD=Q and CCSID= >parameters on the DD statememt to work with datasets on media other than tape. >Especially z/OS UNIX files. There are times when I would really like to keep >some data in z/OS UNIX files using the ISO8859-1 code page. This works fairly >well with z/OS UNIX commands when I use the chtag and extattr commands to >properly tag the files. It would be really helpful to me if I could then read >those files into standard legacy applications using >PATH=...,FILEDATA=TEXT,RECFM=..,LRECL=..,CCSID=819 on the DD. There must be >some sort of code in QSAM and BSAM already since you can read ASCII tapes >using DCB=OPTCD=Q. Of course, I don't know how "creaky" that code is. I think >that IBM avoids touching some old parts of z/OS just out of fear. > OPTCD=Q uses the dreadful IGC0010C 7-bit translation table. Now, if you wanted (as you suggest) something like FTP's sbdataconn=(IBM-1047,ISO8859-1) facility, that might be meaningful.
And, IIRC, FTP requires that one of the CPs be EBCDIC and the other ASCII (-like). Why not translate between two EBCDIC pages, such as 037<->1047, or even ISO8859-1<->UTF-8? (All things that iconv() (already supplied by IBM) does). (I almost forgot -- I hate EBCDIC!) -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
