Encodings: EBCDIC, ASCII and UTF-8

EBCDIC vs ASCII

Mainframes store text in EBCDIC, where letters sit in different code positions than ASCII. Files that cross between a mainframe and Linux need a conversion step, or the text arrives as punctuation soup.

01 WS-NAME PIC X(30). MOVE "Ada" TO WS-NAME.

GnuCOBOL encodings

GnuCOBOL handles encodings with the -fencoding flag or the COB_ENCODING environment variable. Setting ASCII or UTF-8 makes file I/O and string literals behave like any Unix tool:

cobc -x -free -fencoding=UTF-8 -o hello hello.cob

UTF-8 files

PIC X fields are byte-oriented, so one UTF-8 character can span several X positions. For multi-byte text, size fields generously and avoid INSPECT on characters that may be split across a field boundary.

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Article author: Arthur Isaev