Enterprise COBOL supports Unicode UTF-16 as national character data at run time. UTF-16 provides a consistent and efficient way to encode plain text. Using UTF-16, you can develop software that will work with various national languages.
Use these COBOL facilities to code and compile programs that process national data:
You can also take advantage of implicit conversions of alphanumeric or DBCS data items to national representation. The compiler performs such conversions (in most cases) when you move these items to national data items, or compare these items with national data items.
related concepts
Unicode and the encoding of language characters
National groups
related tasks
Using national data (Unicode) in COBOL
Converting to or from national (Unicode) representation
Processing UTF-8 data
Processing Chinese GB 18030 data
Comparing national (UTF-16) data
Coding for use of DBCS support
Converting double-byte character set (DBCS) data
related references
COBOL statements and national data
Intrinsic functions and national data
CODEPAGE
NSYMBOL
Classes and categories of data (Enterprise COBOL Language Reference)
Data categories and PICTURE rules (Enterprise COBOL Language Reference)
MOVE statement (Enterprise COBOL Language Reference)
General relation conditions (Enterprise COBOL Language Reference)