UTF-EBCDIC is acharacter encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid charactercode points inUnicode using 1 to 5bytes (in contrast to a maximum of 4 forUTF-8).^[1] It is meant to beEBCDIC-friendly, so that legacy EBCDIC applications onmainframes may process the characters without much difficulty. Its advantages for existing EBCDIC-based systems are similar toUTF-8's advantages for existingASCII-based systems. Details on UTF-EBCDIC are defined in Unicode Technical Report #16.

To produce the UTF-EBCDIC encoded version of a series of Unicode code points, an encoding based on UTF-8 (known in the specification as UTF-8-Mod) is applied first (creating what the specification calls an I8 sequence). The main difference between this encoding and UTF-8 is that it allows Unicode code pointsU+0080 throughU+009F (theC1 control codes) to be represented as a single byte and therefore later mapped to corresponding EBCDIC control codes. In order to achieve this, UTF-8-Mod uses101xxxxx instead of10xxxxxx as the format for trailing bytes in a multi-byte sequence. As this can only hold 5 bits rather than 6, the UTF-8-Mod encoding of codepoints aboveU+03FF are larger than the UTF-8 encoding.

The UTF-8-Mod transformation leaves the data in an ASCII-based format (for example,U+0041 "A" is still encoded as0x41), so each byte is fed through a reversible (one-to-one) lookup table to produce the final UTF-EBCDIC encoding. For example,0x41 in this table maps to0xC1; thus the UTF-EBCDIC encoding ofU+0041 (Unicode's "A") is0xC1 (EBCDIC's "A").

UTF-EBCDIC is rarely used, even on the EBCDIC-based mainframes for which it was designed.IBM EBCDIC-based mainframe operating systems, such asz/OS, usually useUTF-16 for complete Unicode support. For example,IBM Db2,COBOL,PL/I,Java and theIBMXML toolkit support UTF-16 on IBM mainframes.

There are 160 characters with single-byte encodings in UTF-EBCDIC (compared to 128 in UTF-8). As can be seen, the single-byte portion is similar toIBM-1047 instead of IBM-37 due to the location of the square brackets.CCSID 37 has [] at hex BA and BB instead of at hex AD and BD respectively.

Oracle UTFE is a Unicode 3.0 UTF-8Oracle database variation, similar to theCESU-8 variant of UTF-8, where supplementary characters are encoded as two 4-byte characters rather than a single 4- or 5-byte character. It is used only on EBCDIC platforms.^[2]

• UTF-1
• UTF-8
• BOCU-1

• V.S. Umamaheswaran,Unicode Technical Report #16: the definition of UTF-EBCDIC (2002-04-16)

• Character encoding
• Unicode Transformation Formats

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