Naming and international support

The support for the "root" (/) and QOpenSys file systems ensures that the characters in object names remain constant across encoding schemes used for different national languages and devices.

When an object name is passed to the system, each character of the name is converted to a 16-bit form in which all characters have a standard coded representation. When the name is used, it is converted to the proper coded form for the code page being used.

If the code page to which the name is being converted does not contain a character used in a name, the name is rejected as not valid.

Because characters remain constant across code pages, you should not do an operation on the assumption a particular character will change to another particular character when a specific code page is used. For example, you should not assume the number sign character will change to the pound sterling character even though they may have the same coded representation in different code pages.

Note that the names of the extended attributes of an object are converted in the same way as the name of the object, so the same considerations apply.

Related concepts
Name continuity