Storing and Viewing Unicode Data

Resolving The Problem

This document explains how to store and view unicode data.

Unicode is a standard that precisely defines a character set as well as a small number of encodings for it. It enables you to handle text in any language efficiently. It allows a single application to work for a global audience. Unicode has many advantageous functions. The operating system provides multilingual support. Unicode provides the means to store and retrieve data in the user's national language of choice in a single file and therefore provides for one database file to support all text needs, regardless of the language of the input device. For example, the same file can have Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English data in it. The System i operating system provides support for Unicode.

Unicode cannot be specified as a value for the following:

o The system CCSID
o A user profile CCSID
o A job CCSID

You might, for example, store Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English in the same file. How would you want the physical file to look?

You can use this keyword CCSID for character fields. The CCSID keyword can be set on the file or field level in a physical or logical file.

When specified at the file level for physical files, the CCSID keyword applies to each character field in the file except those character fields that also have the CCSID keyword specified.

If a CCSID value on the physical file field used the UCS-2 encoding scheme, the data type of this field must be type G.
If a CCSID value on the physical file field used the UTF-8 encoding scheme, the data type of this field must be character.
If a CCSID value on the physical file field used the UTF-16 encoding scheme, the data type of this field must be type G.

If the CCSID keyword is not specified at the file level and not all character fields have the CCSID keyword specified, the fields are assigned the default CCSID of the job when the file is created.

If you wanted to view the data using 5250 emulator, you would need to change your emulator host code page and your job CCSID to see the data.  You are not able to view both Simplified and Traditional Chinese at the same time using 5250 emulator.  You will have to set your emulator and job CCSID to 937 to see both the Traditional Chinese and English characters.  To see the Simplified Chinese and English characters, you would need both your job CCSID and emulator set to 935. 

There is a way to see all the data on the screen at the same time.  The solution is to use one of the following.  You would need to use one of the following products:-

IBM i Access Client Solutions emulation based on IBM's Host-on-Demand): 
https://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/software/i/access/solutions.html

Webfacing is in the product HATS (Host Access Transformation Services):
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/awdtools/hats/

IBM i Access for Web Functions 5250: