Unicode conversion support

Some platforms support the conversion of user data to or from Unicode encoding. The two forms of Unicode encoding supported are UCS-2 (CCSIDs 1200, 13488, and 17584) and UTF-8 (CCSID 1208).

The term UCS-2 is often used interchangeably but incorrectly with UTF-16. UCS-2 is a fixed-width encoding where each character occupies 2 bytes. UTF-16 is variable-width encoding that is a superset of UCS-2. In addition to the 2-byte UCS-2 characters, UTF-16 contains characters, known as surrogate pairs, that are 4 bytes in length. IBM® MQ does not support surrogate pairs. The support for UTF-16 and UTF-8 in IBM MQ is therefore limited to those Unicode characters that can be encoded in UCS-2.
Note: IBM MQ does not support UCS-2 queue manager CCSIDs so message header data cannot be encoded in UCS-2.

IBM MQ AIX support for Unicode

On IBM MQ for AIX® conversion to and from Unicode CCSIDs is supported for the CCSIDs in the following table.

IBM MQ HP-UX support for Unicode

On IBM MQ for HP-UX conversion to and from Unicode CCSIDs is supported for the CCSIDs listed in the following table.

IBM MQ for Windows, Solaris, and Linux support for Unicode

On IBM MQ for Windows, IBM MQ for Solaris, and IBM MQ for Linux® conversion to, and from, Unicode CCSIDs is supported for the CCSIDs in the following table.

IBM i support for Unicode

For details on UNICODE support refer to the appropriate IBM i publication relating to your operating system.

IBM MQ for z/OS support for Unicode

On IBM MQ for z/OS® conversion to and from the Unicode CCSIDs is supported for the following CCSIDs: