SYSTEM AND METHOD OF TRANSFORMING INFORMATION BETWEEN UCS AND EBCDIC REPRESENTATIONS EMPLOYING EBCDIC-FRIENDLY TRANSFORMATION FORMATS

A system and method of transforming information between UCS and EBCDIC-friendly representations comprises a two-stage transformation process using a first stage which transforms a UCS string to and from an intermediate form string, referred to as an I8-string. A second stage transforms the I8-string to and from a string in an EBCDIC-friendly representation. The two stages employ transformations which result in control characters and other selected characters being represented as single octets in the I8 and EBCDIC-friendly strings and the transformations are symmetric in both stages. The second stage can produce EBCDIC-friendly strings in one or more selected EBCDIC encodings.