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From: =?UTF-8?Q?Josef_M=C3=B6llers?= <josef@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: encapsulating directory operations
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2025 20:48:45 +0200
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On 04.06.25 17:30, David Brown wrote:
> On 04/06/2025 11:23, Paul Edwards wrote:
>>
>> And I know what you're thinking - all the data is in EBCDIC.
>> There are no other EBCDIC systems I could possibly jump to.
>> We would need an 80386 EBCDIC version of Win32 in order
>> for this to be remotely possible - which doesn't exist, and likely
>> never will exist.
>>
>> For it to exist it would need some sort of pseudo-bios concept
>> that allowed charset conversion. And no such thing exists as far
>> as I am aware!
>>
> 
> You don't need an EBCDIC operating system, or "pseudo-bios" (whatever 
> /that/ might be) to use data using EBCDIC character encoding.  It is no 
> different from working with any other character encoding - ASCII, UTF-8, 
> different 8-bit code pages, or whatever.  If the data is just passing 
> through your code, read it in and pass it out without a care.  If you 
> need to convert it or mix it with some other encoding, work with a 
> common encoding - UTF-8 is normally the right choice.

This might be true if there were no special characters, but eg the slash 
is 2FH in ASCII but 61H in EBCDIC, so Linux may have a problem there. 
The backslash is 0E0H in EBCDIC (at least in Australia, Brasil, Canada, 
and various other countries), 0ECH in Germany and Austria while it is 
5CH in ASCII. So DOS and Windows have a problem here.

So, YES, the operating system has to be aware of the code set used.

Josef