Hello,I would not recommend translating the data to EBCDIC, and then later translating it back to iso-8859-1. "Binary" means that the data isn't text to begin with, so when you translate it to another character set like EBCDIC, there may be values that don't get translated properly. (EBCDIC does not have code points for all 256 possible byte values.) Likewise, when you later translate the EBCDIC back to iso-8859-1, it will be translated by what the (expected) EBCDIC characters are, and what their equivalent in iso-8859-1 will be, which might not be the original binary values.
A better solution is to keep the data in binary, and only translate it once you've deduced what the data type is.
If you save the data to a file (vs a string) HTTPAPI will always preserve the binary values of the bytes when writing it to the file. Given the scenario you described, this is probably ideal -- you don't plan to process the PDF as a string in your program do you? If the data is XML, then you can point your XML reader to the file to process it. (Or read it into a variable if desired.) In my opinion, this is probably the best approach for your situation, write it to a file, check the content-type header, and handle processing based on that type.
If for some reason you prefer the data in a string without writing it to a file, this is also possible. When you call http_setCCSIDs() if you set the first two parameters to the same CCSID, such as http_setCCSIDs(819:819) it will not translate the data. Therefore, the data will be sent as binary data to your program. Then, you can use routines like http_xlatedyn() or the system's iconv() API to translate the data after the fact if translation is needed.
-SK On 4/26/2017 2:58 AM, Scholli Zweitausend wrote:
Hi all, looking for a /best practice/ I hope someone can help me with her or his experience: I have to send a request to a service that answers either with a PDF file (Content-Type: application/pdf) or with an XML file (Content-Type: text/xml;charset=ISO-8859-1). When I receive an XML file, http_req() works fine and correctly translatesISO-8859-1 to EBCDIC. With PDF, it works likewise -- but translating binarydata from ISO-8859-1 to EBCDIC is not the best idea. What I’ve already learned: A program can tell HTTPAPI which conversion tables to use by calling HTTP_setCCSIDs() or http_setOption('LOCAL-CCSID':0) But as far as I understand, this is not to do a conversion /after/ the response has been received. In the past, I re-converted PDF data to ISO-8859-1 using iconv() when I had received data from the GSKit API -- yes, it worked, but I think there must be a better, more reliable solution with HTTPAPI.So, what should I do if I don’t know the content type of the response at the time I am sending the request?Thanks for any suggestions, Markus
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