FTPAPI & text file transfers

[Christian <chrisv5@xxxxxx>]

Sender: Christian <chrisv5@xxxxxx>

hello all,

today I started using FTPLIB for the first time and I made an 
observation which I like to share with everyone (even suggest adding to 
the "documentation".

I am writing a generic utility to transfer arbitrary text files (mainly 
EDI docs & HTML/CSS/JavaScript docs, XML docs) from any FTP server 
to/from the IFS on the iSeries (oops, System i). As others have found, 
if one uses ftp_binaryMode(sessionID: *ON) then the nice ASCII (or 
Latin-1, etc.) files in the IFS get garbled on the FTP server (PUT), or 
one ends up with rubbish in the IFS (GET). It has been suggested in the 
past to use ftp_binaryMode(SessionID: *OFF) in that case.

Well, not only does this strike me odd, to send ASCII files as BINARY, 
it is also quite wrong! It has worked for you guys who GET/PUT files 
from/to Windows FTP servers, but what happens if you send them to UNIX 
style FTP servers? Right, no CRLF to LF transformations occur, which is 
VERY BAD. Same goes for Mac files, which have lines terminated by CR only.

The proper way to do it is the following:

callp     ftp_binaryMode(ftp: *off)
callp     ftp_codePage(ftp: 00819: 00819)

This way the line breaks at the server (CRLF or LF or CR) get converted 
to/from CRLF in the IFS files rather nicely while no code page 
conversion occurs. The only downside is the pretty unnecessary 
conversion from one code page to the same (not sure if the iconv API is 
smart enough to take a short cut).

Of course, one may feel free to use different code pages, but 00819 is 
fine for most Western countries. If you need the € in a PC file, you 
better use 01252. Of course, feel free to use UTF-8 (as long as you are 
on V5R3 at the minimum, iirc) as well, for those dealing mainly with 
Linux and/or XML files.

I hope this was helpful to someone.

Regards,
Christian

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