marshalToString() Method

The marshalToString() method serializes the content of the OTD to a String object. The String is created by decoding the byte data with the OTD’s current encoding, which is the encoding specified when data was last unmarshaled (see setEncoding and unmarshal documentation for additional details). If no data was unmarshaled prior to a marshal call, then the OTD defaults to EBCDIC CP037 encoding. Only use this method with copybook OTDs built from copybooks comprised solely of usage display entries. Using this method on OTDs designed to hold binary data (e.g., packed decimal, internal decimal) may invalidate the data, because portions of the binary content may not have a suitable mapping to UTF-8. A java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException may occur if the current encoding (i.e., the encoding used by the last unmarshal call) is not capable of encoding the data. This is possible because certain charset encodings in Java are not two-way encodings (encodings that can decode or encode, but not both).