Japanese COBOL code on IBM mainframe in Shift-JIS; represented after transfer to a PC how?

Question

We have a Japanese client that has source code in COBOL on an mainframe. He claims the code on the mainframe is represented in Shift-JIS2 (and we think we understand that pretty well). When that code is transferred to an PC, what is the most common encoding used? We've sent him a program to process that COBOL code and it seems to choke. The customer won't give us the code directly, so experiments are hard. His experiments seem to indicate UTF-8; I assume the Japanese characters encodable in Shift-JIS2 are correspondingly converted to Unicode equivalents. Anybody have any experience here?

EDIT: I think we solved our mystery. The client is (duh!) using CP-932 ("ShiftJIS") on the PC, but his COBOL program has Japanese characters in the identifiers, and that's why our tool is choking.

EDIT: Followup: A bit more of a surprise. SHIFT-JIS often encodes what we think of as ASCII text as so-called "FULLWIDTH" characters, that take the same screen space as an East Asian ideograph; conventionalo ASCII characters act as half-width. So, there's a FULLWIDTH "A" , "B", ... "Z" as well as FULLWIDTH "-". Apparantly, to process Japanese COBOL, our COBOL parser has to accept not only Western ASCII, but also the FULLWIDTH equivalents, esp. the FULLWIDTH letters and surprisingly a FULLWIDTH HYPHEN used to seperate "letters" in a COBOL identifier.

EDIT: IBM Enterprise COBOL allows DBCS characters in identifiers. Yikes!

Answer 1

There's three encodings that are all still very much in use in Japan: EUC-JP, ISO-2022-JP, and Shift-JIS.

ISO-2022-JP is usually used for E-mails. While you'll see EUC-JP in Unix machines. I personally haven't dealt with anything other than Shift-JIS though. (Nor mainframes.)