How to read Arabic text from DB2 on z/OS using Node.JS - node.js

Question

I am trying to get data from DB2 table on z/OS in my Node application, where some of the values are stored in Arabic (IBM-420). The result that I am getting in application is the following:
������� ���� ���������
I am using ibm_db version 2.7.4 to fetch data from DB2 and:
Windows 10 - 64 bit
Node version: 14.17.3
NPM version: 7.19.1
I have tried to display the result on the console and writing it on a txt file using fs through following:
fs.writeFile('data.txt', content, err => {
if (err) {
console.error(err)
return
}
})
Any suggestion to convert the text into a proper Arabic?

Answer 1

Resolved by creating the system environment variable DB2CODEPAGE and setting its value to 1208 , then restarting all components to pick up this new variable.
When converting / translating between codepages , the Db2 CLI component will need to know the application code page, along with the DB2 server database code page and convert/translate between them as necessary. This requires the relevant conversion tables to be already present in the Db2 client (in this case the CLIDRIVER).
The DB2CODEPAGE environment variable value 1208 on Microsoft Windows forces the CLI components of Db2 to use Unicode as the application code page. When that DB2CODEPAGE variable is not present then the Db2 CLI component will try to derive the code page from the Microsoft Windows Control Panel Regional Options - which may not be what you need. Other values of this variable are possible, refer to the documentation for details.
When you set DB2CODEPAGE=1208 you must ensure that all the Microsoft -Windows applications really do use unicode or UTF-8 when inserting/updating data in the Db2 tables.