Skip to main content

I tried to use curl to call a REST API that returns a JSON payload. The response was not converted to EBCDIC. I tried with an XML response which was the same. I’m assuming that curl uses the MIME type to figure out what to convert. So any text/* MIME types get correctly converted. I would suggest application/json should also be converted which by the standard is UTF8 encoded. application/xml is different as XML can be in any encoding but I would take a punt and also convert it to EBCDIC.

I tried to use curl to call a REST API that returns a JSON payload. The response was not converted to EBCDIC. I tried with an XML response which was the same. I’m assuming that curl uses the MIME type to figure out what to convert. So any text/* MIME types get correctly converted. I would suggest application/json should also be converted which by the standard is UTF8 encoded. application/xml is different as XML can be in any encoding but I would take a punt and also convert it to EBCDIC.

Hi, David. I don’t know if the behavior you are seeing is intentional or accidental, but it seems to me to be the correct behavior. Since both JSON and XML are UTF-8 friendly, unconditional conversion to EBCDIC (or any other 8-bit encoding) is potentially an information-damaging conversion.

Hi, David. I don’t know if the behavior you are seeing is intentional or accidental, but it seems to me to be the correct behavior. Since both JSON and XML are UTF-8 friendly, unconditional conversion to EBCDIC (or any other 8-bit encoding) is potentially an information-damaging conversion.

Hey Jerry. That’s a reasonable answer but I’m not sure if it’s true for JSON. I’ve ported several JSON parsers to z/OS and any non-ASCII characters (>0x7F) get escaped. When you consider how pervasive JSON is now with APIs IMO a z/OS port of curl should convert to EBCDIC. If not implicitly then a flag would be good so one doesn’t need to pipe it through iconv. The trouble with iconv is that if you want to also include headers it will mangle them.

Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement