Add the management of codepages conversions

[FALLAI-Denis]

The possibility of transferring mvs or uss files by controlling the conversion of characters according codepages seems essential to us.
However, this functionality is not available in the zowe-cli-ftp-plugin.

Confer. #68.

It would be necessary to add at least the management of two options:

• the possibility of specifying the local codepage
• the possibility of specifying the remote codepage

You might need to manage other options to differentiate between single-byte conversions and multi-byte conversions.

This information should be able to be specified at the profile level, and at the level of each command.

Regarding the FTP transfer on z/OS, this concerns several (quote) site options:

• ENCODING=SBCS|MBCS
• SBD=(remote,local) or MBD=(remote,local)
• UNICODEFILESYSTEMBOM=ASIS|ALWAYS|NEVER

[tiantn]

Hi @FALLAI-Denis , thank you. We may have a proposal to add a --site option to zftp commands to let users write their SITE commands. On one hand, this is very flexible for users to change or customize their site configuration. On the other hand, it is easy to maintain the zftp plugin for us. Thank you!

[FALLAI-Denis]

Thanks for your feedback.

The --site option will have to accept multiple parameters, and even the reference to a file, as the number of options can be large.

Even though the configuration of the FTP server on z/OS can be changed (and it is not a simple operation, administratively), there cannot be one configuration that meets all the needs anyway. So you have to be able to specify the options at the client level, therefore at the Zowe CLI level.

[andiknie]

Hi, setting only the server encoding via site-command dosn't seem to be enough. I can set the remote codepage via a ftps.rc-file on the host and get ios8859-1-encoding on the pc-site. That works good, but it's not possible to set a multi-byte-encoding (like UTF-8) if you have to use fixed block files/libraries on host site.
Unfortunality this is the standard format for VSCode and it's always used when pushing changes to the host (dataset).
A real encoding between local files and received/sent files during the transfer-process could fix this problem very easy - I already made a fork and tested this (but only hard coded, not via a configuration setting), check here: https://github.com/andiknie/zowe-cli-ftp-plugin
This change works for me, but I did not manage to create the VSCode-Zowe-FTP-Extension, so I can't use/test it with the VSCode. That's desperatly needed for me to use zowe in germany with the special characters (the umlaute äöüÄÖÜß)

Thank you for your support and this fantastic tools.

[tiantn]

Thank you @andiknie.

For the multi-byte-encoding, you can try to specify the following ftp commands in the ftps.rc-file:

site encoding=mbcs               
site mbdataconn=(utf-8,Latin_1) 

Could you help to test in your environment? Thank you very much!

[FALLAI-Denis]

Hi,

z/OS FTP has limitations regarding conversions between single-byte encoding and multi-byte encoding. It seems to me that this is only possible on variable format files.

[andiknie]

Hi @tiantn,I tried with multi byte encoding, but that's only possible with variable format on this (when sending files to host). Unfortunately we need fixed format for coding.That's why we need client side converting while sending and receiving files. Iconv-lite could do the job and is easy to integrate into zowe ftp.Thank you for considering this.Am 20.09.2022 04:37 schrieb tiantn ***@***.***>: Thank you @andiknie. For the multi-byte-encoding, you can try to specify the following ftp commands in the ftps.rc-file: site encoding=mbcs site mbdataconn=(utf-8,Latin_1) Could you help to test in your environment? Thank you very much! —Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[FALLAI-Denis]

Hi,

FYI, I open a RFE for this issue on 2020, December 16:
FTP - Submit a JOB from a UTF-8 encoded file
It is now tracked on IBM Ideas:
FTP - Submit a JOB from a UTF-8 encoded file

[andiknie]

Hi,that's correct. That's why I need the possibility of a real encoding on the client side. I made a poc with iconv-lite and that worked out very well. It just had to be changed to use parametrically instead of hard coded conversion. You could check out my fork.And I wasn't able to build the vs Code extension für the FTP plugin with my fork.Am 21.09.2022 02:58 schrieb Denis FALLAI ***@***.***>: Hi, z/OS FTP has limitations regarding conversions between single-byte encoding and multi-byte encoding. It seems to me that this is only possible on variable format files. —Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[jhonatan1090]

I'm using the ftp extension and I'm not able to download/upload files with SBD=(IBM-1047, ISO8859-1)... Does anyone have any updates on this issue?