You can compare the character value of a national literal or class national data item with the character value of any of the following other character-string operands: alphabetic, alphanumeric, alphanumeric-edited, DBCS, or numeric-edited of USAGE DISPLAY.
These operands are treated as if they were moved to an elementary national data item. The characters are converted to national (UTF-16) representation, and the comparison proceeds with two national character operands.
related tasks
Using national-character figurative constants
related references
National comparisons (Enterprise COBOL Language Reference)