Mapping of data

The IBM® i operating system uses the EBCDIC encoding scheme. However, not all clients attached to the system 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.