For applications that are required to translate between ASCII and EBCDIC characters, there is inbuilt support for a number of languages. Code set support is further extended by the ability to utilize translation tables distributed by IBM; these tables provide access to many more languages and character sets.
The environment variable MFCODESET determines the code sets to be translated. By setting this variable to the appropriate country code or CCSID(s) as detailed in Supported Country Codes, the required translations are made for certain functionality within the product. For example, any program compiled under the CHARSET"EBCDIC" directive uses the value of this variable; programs that call the _CODESET library routine also rely on this variable.
If the code set you require is not part of the built-in support (that is, not listed in Supported Country Codes), you can install one of the code set tables distributed by IBM; for more information, see To install a CCSID Translation Table. Once installed, the support explained above is extended to the newly installed code sets.
If the available code sets still do not match your needs, you can create custom translations between EBCDIC and ASCII using the Codecomp utility.