CICS® Web support can now handle code page conversion to, from and between the Unicode UTF-8 and UTF-16 character encodings.
Code page conversion for UTF-8 and UTF-16 uses conversion services provided by z/OS®. The conversion facility must be enabled in your z/OS system, as described in z/OS Support for Unicode: Using Conversion Services.
Code page conversion is usually needed so that CICS Web support processing and user-written applications, which typically use an EBCDIC encoding, can communicate with Web clients, which typically use an ASCII encoding. Inbound messages are converted to an EBCDIC encoding for the application to process, and outbound messages generated by the application are converted from an EBCDIC encoding into a suitable character set for the Web client.
The UTF-8 and UTF-16 character encodings can be used for the message body of an item that CICS receives from, or sends to, the Internet. You can convert to and from the UTF-8 and UTF-16 character encodings with any of the EBCDIC code pages that CICS supports.
Note that CICS documents and document templates cannot be converted to the UTF-8 and UTF-16 character encodings. If you want to send an outbound message in these character encodings, use the FROM option on the WEB SEND or WEB CONVERSE command to specify a buffer of data to form the message body, rather than using the DOCTOKEN option to specify a CICS document.