iconv not working the way it should

[lbdyck]

I tried the following command using the zot version of iconv and it fails big time as it does not understand -F

iconv -F -t IBM-1047 envdelta.sh

Then I tried:

iconv -F -t IBM-1047 envdelta.sh

And it failed with the converted data being garbage.

Then I tried

/bin/iconv -F -t IBM-1047 envdelta.sh

and it worked perfectly.

But the man page on the system is the one from z/OS and not from zot assuming there is an updated man page.

[IgorTodorovskiIBM]

For context:

  -F
           Uses the input file's coded character set (as defined in the file tag)
           as the source code set. If -f is also specified, and the oldset matches
           the file tag or if no file tag code is set, then oldset is used as the
           source code set. If -F and -f are specified and oldset does not match
           the file tag code set, then iconv fails with an error.

We could employ the same technique as cat and cp where if we detect an invalid arg, we call the /bin version.

[lbdyck]

or add the z/OS function to the open-source and upstream it so there is only one tool

[IgorTodorovskiIBM]

Yeah, that's probably the better approach here. The offloading to /bin/cp in zopen cp was mainly for the dataset support which will take considerably more effort than this.

[lbdyck]

tis a shame the z/OS source can't be open-sourced so you could take it and upstream the z/OS distinctives :)

[lbdyck]

Had issue with zigi where the iconv of .gitattributes was resulting in a file that was not readable - changed iconv to /bin/iconv and it now works.

Sample of the change

[lbdyck]

in this sample the encoding variable is IBM-1047

[IgorTodorovskiIBM]

It turns out that we're missing this patch in the stable release: zopencommunity/libiconvport@f798b59

[lbdyck]

great catch

[fswarbrick]

Does the zopen version offer anything that the z/OS version does not? Not sure why the zopen version even exists.
I thought it didn't even have EBCDIC support, as I tried using cp "1047". Looks like you have to specify one of these instead: "CP1047 IBM-1047 IBM1047 CSIBM1047".

[IgorTodorovskiIBM]

Interesting, /bin/iconv -l yields 597 encodings while zopen iconv yields 197. @MikeFultonDev ported it so he may have a better idea as to what it offers.