The cobutf8 Utility

The cobutf8 utility enables you to seamlessly run applications that require non-UTF-8 character encodings in an environment that is using a UTF-8 locale.

The required conversion process uses the iconv() API to convert your application's input and output data from the system locale to a target locale specified by the COBUTF8 environment variable. The target locale must be mapped to a character set supported by iconv() using a special configuration file. During the conversion process, any character that does not exist in both the UTF-8 locale and the target locale cannot be mapped, and is substituted for a ? character.

The cobutf8 utility determines the UTF-8 locale as one of the following:

• If the LANG environment variable is set, its value is used as the UTF-8 encoding. cobutf8 will also inherit any values from the LC_* variables (except LC_ALL); for example, set a different value for LC_MONETARY and that UTF-8 locale value will override the value for LANG where appropriate.
• If the LC_ALL environment variable is set, only that value is used as the locale in the conversion process.