Scott Klement: juego de caracteres en el AS400

Sólo para usuarios de AS400/iSeries: Scott Klement dedica una nota suficiente al juego de caracteres y su uso al intercambiar datos con otros sistemas, y entre distintos lenguajes en el propio sistema. Necesario  de conocer. No lo voy a repetir, excepto el siguiente párrafo:

Things You Should Definitely Know

• It is not OK to create a text string without knowing and identifying which CCSID the data is stored in.
• It's not reasonable to expect the computer to "detect" a CCSID.
• Power Systems (and their predecessors, System i5, iSeries, and AS/400) are not "EBCDIC machines." They can run ASCII, EBCDIC, or Unicode equally well.
• The IBM i operating system (and its predecessors i5/OS and OS/400) do most of their work in EBCDIC, but they also understand both ASCII and Unicode and can run programs based on them (e.g., Java, PHP, PASE, Apache).
• IBM i has knowledge of many CCSIDs (including ASCII, EBCDIC and Unicode) built in and can easily and efficiently translate between them.
• The web is not based on ASCII. It is based on Unicode.

Things to Think About When You Have Problems

If you tell me that you have a character encoding problem, I'll want to know the following:

• How the characters were supposed to be encoded in the original file.
• What the CCSID of the original file was.
• How the characters were supposed to be encoded in the destination file.
• What the CCSID of the destination file was.

Para conservar en la guía fundamental de trabajo.