The cobutf8 Utility

The cobutf8 utility enables you to seamlessly run applications that require non-UTF-8 character encodings in an environment that is using a UTF-8 locale.

The required conversion process uses the iconv() API to convert your application's input and output data from the system locale to a target locale specified by the COBUTF8 environment variable. The target locale must be mapped to a character set supported by iconv() using a special configuration file. During the conversion process, any character that does not exist in both the UTF-8 locale and the target locale cannot be mapped, and is substituted for a ? character.

The cobutf8 utility determines the UTF-8 locale as one of the following: