[Info-vax] Making sure Character Encodings dont't break between workstation and OpenVMS

[Tapland]

On Tuesday, September 10, 2019 at 11:26:02 AM UTC+2, Marc Van Dyck wrote:
> Tapland presented the following explanation :
> > I am a beginning software developer for OpenVMS on a Windows workstation. I 
> > previously used Notepad++ and it's NppFTP plugin to browse, download and 
> > upload file to the OpenVMS-machine.
> >
> > With a new computer I noticed that I could no longer get character encodings 
> > (Nordic characters) to show correctly in Npp without manually changing 
> > encoding in each file I pull and open. I also had issues with the encoding 
> > breaking at upload, regardless of settings in the FTP-plugin because of 
> > errendous encoding in the opened file.  
> >   
> > Looking for alternatives I tried out Sublime text, which seems great, and 
> > does seem to show any file I throw at it correctly, but upon trying the 
> > available SFTP plugin the character encodings break. In my PuTTY session I 
> > seem to see the characters correctly when it works on OpenVMS, and errendous 
> > when they are errendous, using ISO-8859-1.  
> >   
> > How do I check what character encodings I need to be using, I assume which 
> > one the OpenVMS machine is really using, so that I can set my editor to use 
> > the same, and to make sure I upload files encoded correctly?
> 
> I know that it would force you to learn a new set of tools but would
> it not be easier to edit the files on the OpenVMS system directly,
> rather than copying them over ?
> 
> -- 
> Marc Van Dyck

Yes, it absolutely is when there isn't a lot of new development or creation of new files.  
  
I think I found a handy way. I set ISO 8859-1 as default and fallback in my editor. Opening files from OpenVMS I will now see if they open with another encoding, and by default the editor will save in 8859-1. Using WinSCP for SFTP, which works, and will try to figure out the built in FTP-clients later.