Thanks Ivan. That is where this question started, what output encoding
can I use to preserve these EBCDIC characters?

On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 2:12 PM, Ivan Shmakov <oneingray@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>>>> a kusa <akusa8@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> []
>
>  > Well, I have <xsl:output encoding> set to utf-8 right now.  If I set
>  > it to EBCDIC, then the rest of the content in the XML converts to
>  > gibberish.
>
>         Which is expected, if you view an EBCDIC-encoded XML file with
>         an application that assumes ASCII-based encoding.  Try to upload
>         the resulting file using FTP /binary/ mode to the mainframe and
>         check if the file is still unreadable /there./
>
>         (Alternatively, or perhaps complementarily, use an
>         EBCDIC-capable application to view the resulting file locally.)
>
>  > Thats what I meant.
>
>  > I only need the special characters -esp. Latin-1 characters like the
>  > plusminus sign, to convert to the right EBCDIC code.
>
>  > I have a java program that FTPs the file; I believe the default is
>  > ASCII.
>
>         There /may/ be a problem if /either/ this program or the FTP
>         server assume that the input is ASCII, because the characters
>         such as PLUS-MINUS SIGN are /not/ representable in ASCII.
>
>         One solution is to configure either the FTP client or FTP server
>         to /correctly/ convert UTF-8 to EBCDIC.  The other is to
>         configure the XSLT implementation (with <xsl:output />) to
>         output EBCDIC, and send the result to the target host /without/
>         any encoding conversion (i. e., using FTP binary mode.)
>
> --
> FSF associate member #7257