The Command Line Interface › Creating Custom Character Sets for File Conversion › Customizing Default Character Sets

Customizing Default Character Sets

You can build a conversion file by customizing a copy of the atoe.tab or etoa.tab character sets and changing the character translations only where necessary.

To specify external character conversions tables for use by transfers, the CODETABL parameter (one to three characters with no default value). The CODETABL parameter is a prefix to the name of the files containing the external ASCII-to-EBCDIC and EBCDIC-to-ASCII character conversion tables.

Note: The CODETABL parameter is valid (resulting with the user‑defined conversion tables loaded) only if the xcom.glb parameter INTERNAL_CONVERSION_TABLES=NO. Failure to specify INTERNAL_CONVERSION_TABLES=NO results in the source or target system not loading or using the defined conversion tables.

When creating external custom ASCII-to-EBCDIC and EBCDIC-to-ASCII translation tables, create the ATOE/ETOA tables using the xxxatoe.tab and xxxetoa.tab naming convention.

• All custom translation tables must be in the $XCOM_HOME/convtab directory. The following files are supplied on your distribution media and contain the tables that are used to map ASCII-to-EBCDIC and EBCDIC-to-ASCII translations:$XCOM_HOME/convtab/atoe.tab
• $XCOM_HOME/convtab/etoa.tab

Note: $XCOM_HOME is an environment variable.