I have searched for a setting within the mvbasic extension within VSCode but I may have hit a dead end. I am new to using VSCode with the rocket mvbasic extension and still in the learning process, so please bear with me.
Our development for the most part has always been directly on the server using the editor within it to code and develop on a Unix/Aix platform with Unidata. Some of our code has array assignments with CHAR(253)/CHAR(254) characters within them. See the link to the image that shows how its done. Now I didn't do this code, the original software developer did this many many years ago and we just aren't going to go and change it all.
How code looks on actual server
The issue is when pulling the code to edit in VSCode, the extension is changing it, and I uploaded it back and didn't pay attention and it was implemented in our production incorrectly, which created a few bugs.
ALIST="H�V�P�R�M�D" How code looks in VSCode
How code looks after uploaded back to server from VSCode Easy to fix, no biggie, but now to my question.
Does anyone have this issue, or has a direction to point me into that maybe I need to create a setting to keep the characters in the correct ASCII format so that this doesn't happen again by mistake?
VSCode defaults to the sane choice for character encoding in 2022: utf-8, but sometimes you have to deal with legacy stuff.
https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editor/codebasics#_file-encoding-support
If you click on the UTF-8 in the bottom right corner you can choose "Reopen with Encoding":
After that, you can select a different encoding. I chose DOS (CP437) at a guess and literal MV characters are displayed as superscript 2 (²), and for me I can save to the server and confirm those characters remain as @VM after a round trip (though for my terminal emulator they appear as } which is useful).
You can edit preferences and set "files.encoding": "cp437". One other thing that can be helpful if your programs don't have a standard extension (like .bas) as most don't is to set the default mode to basic so most of what you're editing will identify as MVbasic, and you can do a quick CTRL-K M to switch to any other modes if you're just pasting in something else like SQL.
Some useful links - the Rocket forums are helpful and the folks there are always super nice
https://community.rocketsoftware.com/forums/multivalue?CommunityKey=521bce2e-71d5-4d32-b560-dfa95e950eb5
The MV Extensions Community extension is a good group and always has been helpful when I've had issues. I've made some small contributions - they're very open. I prefer this extension, but honestly haven't done a deep comparison.
https://github.com/mvextensions