A code page contains the encoding to specify characters in a set of one or more languages. An encoding is the assignment of a number to a character in the character set. You use code pages to identify data that might be in different languages. For example, if you create a mapping to process Japanese data, you must select a Japanese code page for the source data.

When you choose a code page, the program or application for which you set the code page refers to a specific set of data that describes the characters the application recognizes. This influences the way that application stores, receives, and sends character data.

Most machines use one of the following code pages:

The US-ASCII code page contains all 7-bit ASCII characters and is the most basic of all code pages with support for United States English. The US-ASCII code page is not compatible with any other code page. When you install either the

CDI-PC Client

,

CDI-PC Integration Service

, or

CDI-PC repository

on a US-ASCII system, you must install all components on US-ASCII systems and run the

CDI-PC Integration Service

in ASCII mode.

MS Latin1 and Latin1 both support English and most Western European languages and are compatible with each other. When you install the

CDI-PC Client

,

CDI-PC Integration Service

, or

CDI-PC repository

on a system using one of these code pages, you can install the rest of the components on any machine using the MS Latin1 or Latin1 code pages.

You can use the IBM EBCDIC code page for the

CDI-PC Integration Service

process when you install it on a mainframe system. You cannot install the

CDI-PC Client

or

CDI-PC repository

on mainframe systems, so you cannot use the IBM EBCDIC code page for

CDI-PC Client

or

CDI-PC repository

installations.