Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC)

GDDM V3R2 System Customization and Administration

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC)

GDDM V3R2 System Customization and Administration
SC33-0871-02

Both alphanumeric text characters and graphics text characters are represented internally as hexadecimal codes. A code page is a mapping between these hexadecimal codes and the characters they represent. The hexadecimal codes in a code page are usually referred to as code points.

By default, IBM devices attached to host computers use the Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC) to represent single-byte characters. The EBCDIC codes for the Latin letters (A through Z) in uppercase and lowercase, and for Arabic numerals (0 through 9), are consistent across devices. However, EBCDIC allows the characters represented by some other codes, designated as being for national use, to vary from one device to another. For example, X'5B' is a national-use code: on terminals made for the U.S.A., X'5B' usually represents the dollar sign, $, but U.K. terminals normally use this code to represent the pound sign, . In the U.S.A., X'4A' usually represents the cent sign, , whereas in the U.K. it usually represents the dollar sign. So, if you enter this data on a U.S.A. terminal:

Price: $1 large or 50 small

store it in a file, and redisplay it on a U.K. terminal, you will probably see:

Price: 1 large or 50$ small

Furthermore, if the source and target code pages do not have the same number of code points, a code generated by one device may have no corresponding character defined for it on another device. In other words, data can contain characters that are nondisplayable or nonprintable on some devices.

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