WebSphere Message Broker performs string operations in Universal Character Set coded in 2 octets (UCS-2). If incoming strings are not encoded in UCS-2, they must be converted to UCS-2. The broker uses international components for Unicode (ICU) code page converters to do this. The Unicode Consortium has further information on Unicode.
A code page converter is a mapping from the byte sequence in one code page to a serialized representation of UCS-2, known as UCS Transformation Format 16 bit form (UTF-16). A code page converter allows the broker to create a UCS-2 representation of an incoming string.
WebSphere Message Broker currently supports the code pages listed in Supported code pages. If you need support for an additional code page, or if you require a different variant of a code page, you can extend the broker to support this code page.