Processing data in an international environment
COBOL for Windows
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 and culturally sensitive collation orders for
such data:
- Data types and literals:
- Character data types, defined with the USAGE NATIONAL
clause and a PICTURE clause that defines data of category
national, national-edited, or numeric-edited
- Numeric data types, defined with the USAGE NATIONAL
clause and a PICTURE clause that defines a numeric data item (a
national decimal item) or an external floating-point data item
(a national floating-point item)
- National literals, specified with literal prefix N or NX
- Figurative constant ALL national-literal
- Figurative constants QUOTE, SPACE, HIGH-VALUE,
LOW-VALUE, or ZERO, which have national character
(UTF-16) values when used in national-character contexts
- The COBOL statements shown in the related reference below about
COBOL statements and national data
- Intrinsic functions:
- NATIONAL-OF to convert an alphanumeric or double-byte
character set (DBCS) character string to USAGE NATIONAL
(UTF-16)
- DISPLAY-OF to convert a national character string to USAGE
DISPLAY in a selected code page (EBCDIC, ASCII, EUC, or
UTF-8)
- The other intrinsic functions shown in the related reference
below about intrinsic functions and national data
- The GROUP-USAGE NATIONAL clause to define groups that
contain only USAGE NATIONAL data items and that behave like
elementary category national items in most operations
- Compiler options:
- NSYMBOL to control whether national or DBCS processing is
used for the N symbol in literals and PICTURE clauses
- NCOLLSEQ to specify the collating sequence
for comparison of national operands
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
Setting the locale
related references
COBOL statements and national data
Intrinsic functions and national data
NCOLLSEQ
NSYMBOL
Classes and categories of data
(COBOL for Windows Language Reference)
Data categories and PICTURE rules
(COBOL for Windows Language Reference)
MOVE statement
(COBOL for Windows Language Reference)
General relation conditions
(COBOL for Windows Language Reference)
|