Inserting and viewing square brackets during an ISPF edit session

When your workstation is sending correct hexadecimal values for the square brackets to the host system, you might find that they are still not correctly displayed during by ISPF. If you are using a programmable workstation or a 3270 terminal, you should include the sample ISPF macro CCNGMV2 in a regular CLIST library that is concatenated to the ddname SYSPROC. CCNGMV2 supports ISPF display of the "[" and "]" characters in text, trigraph, or hex form. You can toggle through the three settings.
Note: If you are using 3279-S3G-1 with ISPF, z/OS® batch, or TSO, see Displaying square brackets when using ISPF on 3279 emulation.

After you reset the environment by specifying the appropriate code page for the compiler, follow these steps:

  1. Start ISPF and open a C or C++ source file with square brackets.
  2. Run CCNGMV2 before editing to convert the compiler recognizable hexadecimal values of the square brackets to trigraphs.
  3. Run CCNGMV2 again to convert the trigraphs to displayable characters.
  4. Edit your C or C++ source code.
  5. Run the CCNGMV2 macro again to convert the displayable characters back to the original hexadecimal values.
  6. Save and file the C source file.