It has become increasingly difficult for us mainframe people to ignore the presence of various decentralised platforms. The most irritating thing about those platforms is their character set which is not the same as on the mainframe. It means of course lot of work, but we have plenty of that already. More and more often I see data from decentralised platforms ending up on the mainframe without being converted. When I want to read it, it is completely unreadable. Until recently I copied such files back to the decentralised environment and read them there.

One of the products which has been infiltrated with character sets from the decentralised platform is DB2. The DB2 catalogue is stored as UNICODE. Fortunately DB2 does a good job in hiding this fact from us, but at least one of the tables (SYSPACKSTMT) has been made unreadable. I contacted my good friend Johnny Mossin regarding this and he told me that when I have executed my SPUFI query and is in an ISPF BROWSE session on the result I just execute command DISPLAY UTF8. UTF8 is as you might know a UNICODE format. You can also use DISPLAY ASCII. When you have recovered from the experience of suddenly being able to read ASCII characters on the mainframe it is good to know that DISPLAY RESET makes it all unreadable again.

Unfortunately there is no corresponding command in ISPF EDIT/VIEW. That would be a nice feature to be able to convert a file from ASCII to EBCDIC and back again. So you can only use DISPLAY in ISPF BROWSE. Please be aware that it is only the characters in data that is made readable. If you want to find something in data you have to specify the search string using the correct ASCII values. Here the HEX command can be a valuable help, because it displays the correct HEX-value of the data while the character itself is displayed according to the DISPLAY command you have used most recently.