Rules
It is important to understand that a Unicode character can be from one to four bytes in length, depending upon if the session character set is UTF8 or UTF16. Therefore, the size of output or export files is not indicative of the number of characters it contains.
It is the user's responsibility to ensure that the endianness of any UTF-16 input files are the same as the endianness of the platform BTEQ is running on. If not, or if an incorrect BOM is encountered, BTEQ will report an error.
Workstation-Attached Systems
To start a UTF-8 or UTF-16 session, it is recommended that the -c option be used to define the session charset encoding, and possibly the -e option (batch mode) or -m option (interactive mode) to define the I/O encoding.
A BOM is optional for the following input files:
A BOM is optional for the following output files:
Note: BTEQ does not allow for a BOM to be written to stdout or stderr.
Mainframe-Attached Systems
z/OS BTEQ supports Unicode sessions in the following way:
Notice:
The EBCDIC repertoire is much smaller than Unicode. Trying to display Unicode characters not in the EBCDIC repertoire to SYSOUT (or a MESSAGEOUT file) will result in a translation error.