Subject: NLS support for 3270 hosts

From: Arun Padmanabhan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 1998 09:56:19 -0400

Hello,
 I am currently working on a terminal emulation project over WinNT
platform  that involves extending support to emulate foreign (european)
3270/3270E hosts (only SBCS. we are not interested in supporting Unicode
at this moment). The 3270 data stream manual however does not talk about
this in detail. I have a few questions in mind. Does the SNA gateway
send you information about its char set in the 3270 data stream. What
character set standards (like ISO8859-1) should be supported on the
client end in order to emulate european hosts. Do I have to know in
advance as to which host I am connected to (the locale in which the host
resides).

Are there any books/manuals/publications that discuss this in detail ?

Your help will be much appreciated.

arun

---

From: Michael Boe <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 1998 21:48:46 -0800 (PST)

Anybody?

> Your help will be much appreciated.

Arun,

I'm a server developer, so I'm a bit ignorant of these matters :-).  TN3270
Servers (and SNA servers) try very hard *not* to care about displayable
character mappings, or "code-pages" as they are called in both DOS and Windows.
We also attempt to not have to know about character representation-sets (such
as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode (UTF7,UTF8,UTF16, etc), though this is sometimes
impossible: gateways need at least have to map a modicum of ASCII<-->EBCDIC, if
only for network-management purposes.

Having said that, you can probably guess that gateways (SNA or TN3270) do not
send any information to the client about either the displayable code-page or
character representation being used. So in all likelihood, the answer is yes,
you need to know the locale in advance. But I'm sure one or more of the client
vendors can make a more informed comment than I.

Indeed, client-vendor commentary would be a good idea in any case so that we
know what to do about the locale issue wrt service location.

/msb