Unicode Encodings in PeopleSoft COBOL on z/OS

The character set that you use for PeopleSoft COBOL processing must match the character set for your database. If you create a Unicode database for a PeopleSoft system, you must also run COBOL in Unicode.

Note:

In this topic, the word character refers to a single character in any language, regardless of how many bytes are required to store the character.

The Unicode standard provides several methods of encoding Unicode characters into a byte stream. Each encoding has specific properties that make it suitable for use in different environments. Two main encodings that are important to understand are:

Encoding	Description
UCS-2	The Unicode encoding that PeopleSoft COBOL on z/OS Unicode environment uses. PeopleTools uses the encoding internally for data that is held in memory on the application server.
UTF-8	The Unicode encoding that PeopleSoft systems use in COBOL running on Unix and Microsoft Windows servers.

On Unix and Microsoft Windows servers, PeopleSoft uses UTF-8 encoding to support Unicode in COBOL. PeopleSoft uses UTF-8 since it is a superset of the US-ASCII character set, which is the native character set of these operating systems. PeopleSoft can support Unicode in these environments without requiring any special support from the COBOL compiler.

However, in the z/OS environment the native character set is EBCDIC. UTF-8 is not compatible with EBCDIC, and the COBOL runtime environment on z/OS does not recognize the data in UTF-8 correctly as it expects data encoded in EBCDIC. As a result, PeopleSoft supports Unicode COBOL on z/OS by relying on the IBM Enterprise COBOL compiler’s native Unicode support, which uses UCS-2.