Mapping of data

i5/OS™ uses the EBCDIC encoding scheme. However, not all clients attached to it use an EBCDIC encoding scheme to store, retrieve, and process data. Therefore, some clients use Unicode as an exchange mechanism that is safe across all platforms.

Some clients might use ASCII, PC DATA, or other encoding schemes. They can using Unicode to prevent the loss of data due to incomplete conversion between encoding schemes and code pages.

These examples highlight two users on the same system. One user is English and the other Greek. The English user has his display device CCSID set to 37. The Greek user has his display device CCSID set to 875. Both users query, update, and replace data in the DATABASE1. DATABASE1 is tagged with CCSID 37.

Example: Display data without Unicode
Problems with data integrity develop because users are operating with CCSIDs that have varied character support. That is, not all characters in CCSID 37 are available in CCSID 875 and vice versa.
Example: Display data with Unicode
This example, using UCS-2 as the CCSID of DATABASE1, shows how data integrity is maintained both in storing and retrieving data.
UCS-2 level-1 mapping tables
You can convert characters encoded in universal coded character set 2 level 1 (UCS-2 level-1) from uppercase to lowercase. The uppercase-to-lowercase mapping table shows the mapping for this conversion.

Parent topic: Work with Unicode