Ability to see the file encoding metadata of USS files

[PhilWakelin]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Editing text files in the right encoding is fraught with errors on z/OS due to the mixture of ASCII, EBCDIC and UTF encodings that proliferate across the platform.

Ideally data conversion this should be seamless but this is quite often not the case, as some products still do not correctly tag the charset of all files. Zower Explorer does offer a nice feature to edit a file in a given encoding, but it would also be good to offer the use the abilty to check the file encoding metadata that is available with each file on USS. This is stored in the extended attributes and consists of a charset and transfer mode. Other editors like RSE enable you to easily see the file encoding information to help troubleshoot conversion issues.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like the ability to be able to easily see the encoding information stored on a UNIX file in USS using the context menu on any given file. This encoding information is a key part of the file metadata. In particular the charset is very useful in case you want to edit the file in a specific encoding as the default edit action did not work.

The following show how to view the encoding information for the server.xml file used by Liberty.

ls command

$ [MV2C] /u/wakelin/cicsjava/IYK2Z32A/servers/LIBERTY: ll -T server.xml
t ISO8859-1   T=on  -rwxrwx---   1 WAKELIN  TSOUSER     3296 Oct 27 16:04 server.xml

RSE -> Properties -> Info menu

Additional context

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[t1m0thyj]

Zowe Explorer offers two ways to see the file encoding metadata for a USS file:

1. When you right-click on a file in USS tree and select "Open with Encoding", the file tag is shown as first item in the list:

2. When you right-click on a file in USS tree and select "Edit Attributes", the file tag is shown as an editable textbox: