Stream: WAVEZ 101
Time: 10:00 - 10:45
One of the first things that any mainframer has to deal with is the EBCDIC codepage tar pit. It affects everything related to text, especially source code files, and rears itself a lot on the boundary of PC tooling (IDEs, CICD pipelines, source code managers, ...) that want to store data in UTF yet do I/O with a z/OS system running in EBCDIC. It also throws up issues when dealing with systems written for the US ASCII codepage that have to work in other geos (such as Sweden with 29 letter alphabet, or Turkey with four I characters, or Asian character sets, ...). This talk will cover codepages from the basics, and show how iconv, chtag, BPXK_AUTOCVT and other z/OS and USS commands are your new best friends when dealing with mainframe text files. We'll show this through the lifecycle of a simple file moved back and forth between computers getting mangled, and fixed on the way. This is not a session for codepage experts to come to, but by the end everyone who does come will be transformed into a codepage exert !
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Joe is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the IBM z Systems software group. He is a member of the Zowe open mainframe project working with customers and business partners to create an open source tooling platform for z/OS tools.
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