Currently Woodstox only detects that input appears to be EBCDIC (as per guidance from xml specifications encoding handling), but does not try to handle it but throws a specific exception. This is since it wasn't known whether (a) JDK supports EBCDIC, and/or (b) if anyone really needs support. (b) is no longer true (a user has requested support), and it sounds like JDK does have some level of support. If so, adding EBCDIC handling might be easy to do.