Characters that are not valid

Some characters do not fall into the legal COBOL character set. Consider this example:

COPY  A  REPLACING  == % ==  BY  == 1 ==.

where member A contains:

%  XDATA  PIC  X.

Here, the "non-COBOL" character is the "%" character.

Under both CMPR2 and NOCMPR2, the member above will be copied with the replacement executed. The Enterprise COBOL compiler will issue an E-level diagnostic message.

IGYLI0163-E: Non-COBOL character "%" was found in column 8. The character was accepted.

In both cases, after processing all COPY statements, a legal COBOL program should result.