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The ENCODING= option enables you to dynamically change the character-set encoding for processing external data. This allows you to read or write data in a different encoding than your operating environment's session encoding.

Use caution when an external file contains a mix of character and binary data (such as packed decimal or integer binary) that has been created on a non-native system, as the ENCODING= option trancodes the entire file. The character data trancodes correctly but the binary data is corrupted.

For example, consider a file created on an IBM mainframe which has both character data and packed decimal data in EBCDIC. A Windows system is used to read the file. The ENCODING= option is specified to change the character-set encoding to match the file's encoding, which is different than the session encoding. The ENCODING= option trancodes the entire file. The character data is trancoded and read in correctly. The packed decimal data is trancoded and is corrupted.

This situation can also cause the following error message(s):

   
   FATAL: Wide character FILE/INFILE/FILENAME options have been    
   specified.  Wide character support is not currently enabled.

   OR

   NOTE: Invalid data for ... in line ...

The correct way to process this type of file is to read the file twice, once with the ENCODING= option to read the character data, and then a second time without the ENCODING= option to read the packed decimal data.

Alternatively, you can leave out the ENCODING= option on the FILENAME statement and transcode each character variable with the KCVT function. For example: CVAR = KCVT(CVAR,'UTF-8');

Or, if the character data is in Unicode format, you can use an appropriate Unicode informat for reading the data.

If problems still occur, another thing to check is how the file was transferred from one operating system to another. It is possible the file was converted from EBCDIC to ASCII or vice versa which may have corrupted the data during the transfer. Use a binary mode to transfer the file so that the data remains in the native form of the operating system it was created on.

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