In most cases, you can use a national group as though it were an elementary data item.
In the following example, a national group item, Group-1, is moved to a national-edited item, Edited-date. Because Group-1 is treated as an elementary data item during the move, editing takes place in the receiving data item. The value in Edited-date after the move is 06/23/2008 in national characters.
01 Edited-date PIC NN/NN/NNNN USAGE NATIONAL.
01 Group-1 GROUP-USAGE NATIONAL.
02 Month PIC 99 VALUE 06.
02 DayOf PIC 99 VALUE 23.
02 Year PIC 9999 VALUE 2008.
. . .
MOVE Group-1 to Edited-date.
If Group-1 were instead an alphanumeric group in which each of its subordinate items had USAGE NATIONAL (specified either explicitly with a USAGE NATIONAL clause on each elementary item, or implicitly with a USAGE NATIONAL clause at the group level), a group move, rather than an elementary move, would occur. Neither editing nor conversion would take place during the move. The value in the first eight character positions of Edited-date after the move would be 06232008 in national characters, and the value in the remaining two character positions would be 4 bytes of alphanumeric spaces.
related tasks
Assigning values to group data items (MOVE)
Comparing national data and alphanumeric-group operands
Using national groups as group items
related references
MOVE statement (Enterprise COBOL Language Reference)