So what is the best practice for reading files from z/OS and OMVS? Should you: Look to see whether the file is binary or text, if it's text what encoding is it

So what is the best practice for reading files from z/OS and OMVS? Should you: Look to see whether the file is binary or text, if it's text what encoding is it in and what is the record length (if there is one). Then open the file as binary and write wrappers for fread and fgets to do the necessary conversions yourself to utf-8 and unix newlines? BTW, fixed length records? Way old school and yuck. Just use an index into the file with lengths already. What about all the wasted space from records that aren't full?