High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! UTF-EBCDIC is a character encoding used to represent Unicode characters. It is meant to be EBCDIC-friendly, so that legacy EBCDIC applications on mainframes may process the characters without much difficulty. Its advantages for existing EBCDIC-based systems are similar to UTF-8`s advantages for existing ASCII-based systems. Details on UTF-EBCDIC are defined in Unicode Technical Report #16.