Parsing documents in other code pages

You can parse XML documents that are encoded in code pages other than the explicitly supported single-byte code pages by converting them to Unicode UCS-2 in a national data item, using the MOVE statement when the document is in a COBOL data item. If the XML document is in an IFS file, use the copy object (CPY) command to copy and convert the document to UCS-2, CCSID 13488. You can then convert the individual pieces of document text passed to your processing procedure in special register XML-NTEXT back to the original code page as necessary, using the MOVE statement.

related references
Coded character sets for XML documents (ILE COBOL Language Reference)