International Business Machines Corporation

David Brush

Andreas Maier

Wolfgang Reichert

John S Kapernick

William B Nettles

Milos Lalovic

The present invention provides facilities for tagging files or data with attribute information in the form of a file tag (TAGINFO) which contains an identifier for text information (TEXTFLAG) and an attribute (COSID) for identifying encoding schemes. TXTFLAG is an auto conversion flag. Furthermore, a runtime attribute (process CCSLD) is assigned to a process specifying the runtime encoding scheme. A conversion is done automatically by an auto conversion function if both CCSIDs allow a conversion. Files having no file tag are tagged with a virtual file tag by means of an automatic tagging (AUTOTAG) function using heuristic rules for determining whether the data or file contains text or binary information. Old applications must work with untagged files as before. Existing applications should be able to benefit from auto conversion and thereby to be enabled to process new, tagged files without code changes.

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Woodstock, NY, United States of America

David Brush