Converting to or from national (Unicode) representation

You can implicitly or explicitly convert data items to national (UTF-16) representation.

About this task

You can implicitly convert alphabetic, alphanumeric, DBCS, or integer data to national data by using the MOVE statement. Implicit conversions also take place in other COBOL statements, such as IF statements that compare an alphanumeric data item with a data item that has USAGE NATIONAL.

You can explicitly convert to and from national data items by using the intrinsic functions NATIONAL-OF and DISPLAY-OF, respectively. By using these intrinsic functions, you can specify a code page for the conversion that is different from the code page that is in effect for a data item.