Using national data (Unicode) in COBOL

In Enterprise COBOL, you can specify national (UTF-16) data in any of several ways.

About this task

These types of national data are available:

  • National data items (categories national, national-edited, and numeric-edited)
  • National literals
  • Figurative constants as national characters
  • Numeric data items (national decimal and national floating-point)

In addition, you can define national groups that contain only data items that explicitly or implicitly have USAGE NATIONAL, and that behave in the same way as elementary category national data items in most operations.

These declarations affect the amount of storage that is needed.

Related references  
Storage of character data  
Classes and categories of data (Enterprise COBOL for z/OS® Language Reference)