Site code to enable UTF-8 to EBCDIC encoding

Question

I'm trying to transmit a rather large UTF-8 file to a Z/OS dataset. Unfortunately, the command

SITE EN=MBCS MBD=(1047,1208) RECFM=VB
TYPE A
STOR STORE.WRK.DATA

responds with

504 Multi-byte encoding not supported for RECFM=FB

It seems the RECFM=VB doesn't work.

The workaround is to recode UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 before uploading, but encoding while uploading is more efficient.

Answer 1

The trick to making this work might be multifaceted.

First, the site in question must have the conversion from IBM-1047 to IBM 1208 defined in Unicode Conversion Services for z/OS. If it isn't, the attempt to covert will fail.

Second, you can't send an single byte per character code page to a dataset sized for that, but turn it into a multi byte per character code page. If any of the characters in that dataset grow to two or three bytes, the record length is going to cause failure. So transmit it to a variable record length dataset, and you will be fine.