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

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2019-09-10 kl. 10:11, skrev Tapland:
> 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...

"Not show correctly" is not enough information. What do you see
and what did you expect/want?

> 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...

OpenVMS does not have real knowledge of any character enoding, it
simply stores whatever is throuwn on it. It fully up to the tools
used (terminal emulator such as Putty or some IDE like Notepad++)
to create/store the files using whatever encoding you prefer/want.

There is no file system metadata that tells what the encoding is
for a specific file. There are no OpenVMS tools (that I know about)
that reads and understand the Byte-order-mark used to tell the
encoding in a file using one of the UTFxx encodings.

In our environment we use a 7-bit Latin-1 character encoding for
historical reasons. So {}[] and a couple of others are replaced
with the Swedish åäöÅÄÖ chars in the standard 7-bit US-ASCII table.
Tried 8-10 years ago to switch to ISO-8859-11 (mostly like DEC-MCS)
but it was never done.



> so that I can set my
> editor to use the same, and to make sure I upload files encoded
> correctly?

To whatever encoding you want your files to end up with. :-)

Jan-Erik.