Using variables

For example, if a customer name is an alphanumeric data item in your program, you could define and use the customer name as shown below:

Data Division.
01  Customer-Name           Pic X(20).
01  Original-Customer-Name  Pic X(20).
. . .
Procedure Division.
    Move Customer-Name to Original-Customer-Name
    . . .

You could instead define the customer names above as national or UTF-8 data items by specifying their PICTURE and USAGE clauses as Pic N(20) USAGE NATIONAL or Pic U(20) USAGE UTF-8, respectively. National data items are represented in Unicode UTF-16, in which most characters are represented in 2 bytes of storage. UTF-8 data items are represented in Unicode UTF-8, which is a variable-width encoding of Unicode, using one to four bytes of storage to represent each character.