Basic National Literals
When the NATIONALPICNLIT PROCESS option is in effect, the opening delimiter N" or N' identifies a national literal. A national literal is of the class and category national.
When the NATIONALPICNLIT PROCESS option is not in effect, the opening delimiter N" or N' identifies a DBCS literal, and the rules specified in DBCS Literals apply.
Basic national literals have the following format:
Format >>-N"--character-data--"---------------------------------------><
- N"
- The opening delimiter for a national literal.
- character-data
- The source text representation of the content of the national literal. character-data can contain any allowable character from the EBCDIC character set.
- "
- The closing delimiter for a national literal.
The enclosing quotation marks (or apostrophes) are excluded from the literal when the program is compiled. An embedded quotation mark must be represented by a pair of quotation marks ("").
If the *APOST compiler option is in effect, the national literal must be enclosed by apostrophes (').
N'This literal''s content includes an apostrophe'
N'This literal includes ", which is not used in the opening delimiter'
N"This literal includes "", which is used in the opening delimiter"
The maximum length of a basic national literal is 256 characters, excluding the opening and closing delimiters. The literal must contain at least one character.
The source text representation of character-data is automatically converted to the national CCSID in effect for use at run time, for example, when the literal is moved to or compared with a data item of category national.
ALL followed by a basic national literal is a basic national literal.
End of IBM Extension