When a character field is moved into a numeric result field, the digit portion of each character is converted to its corresponding numeric character and then moved to the result field. Blanks are transferred as zeros. For the MOVE operation, the zone portion of the rightmost character is converted to its corresponding sign and moved to the rightmost position of the numeric result field. It becomes the sign of the field. (See Figure 345 for an example.) For the MOVEL operation, the zone portion of the rightmost character of factor 2 is converted and used as the sign of the result field (unless factor 2 is shorter than the result field) whether or not the rightmost character is included in the move operation. (See Figure 347 for an example.)
If move operations are specified between numeric fields, the decimal positions specified for the factor 2 field are ignored. For example, if 1.00 is moved into a three-position numeric field with one decimal position, the result is 10.0.
Factor 2 may contain the figurative constants *ZEROS for moves to character or numeric fields. To achieve the same function for graphic fields, the user should code *ALLG'oXXi' (where 'XX' represents graphic zeros).
When moving data from a character source to graphic fields, if the source is a character literal, named constant, or *ALL, the compiler will check to make sure it is entirely enclosed by one pair of shift-out shift-in characters (SO/SI). The compiler also checks that the character source is of even length and at least 4 bytes (SO/SI plus one graphic character). When moving from a hexadecimal literal or *ALLX to graphic field, the first byte and last byte of the hexadecimal literal or the pattern within *ALLX must not be 0E (shift out) and 0F (shift in). But the hexadecimal literal (or pattern) should still represent an even number of bytes.
When a character field is involved in a move from/to a graphic field, the compiler will check that the character field is of even length and at least 4 bytes long. At runtime, the compiler checks the content of the character field to make sure it is entirely enclosed by only one pair of SO/SI.
When moving from a graphic field to a character field, if the length of the character field is greater than the length of the graphic field (in bytes) plus 2 bytes, the SO/SI are added immediately before and after the graphic data. This may cause unbalanced SO/SI in the character field due to residual data in the character field, which will not be diagnosed by the compiler.
When move operations are used to move data from character fields to graphic fields, shift-out and shift-in characters are removed. When moving data from graphic fields to character fields, shift-out and shift-in characters are inserted in the target field.
When move operations are used to convert data from character to UCS-2 or from UCS-2 to character, the number of characters moved is variable since the character data may or may not contain shift characters and graphic characters. For example, five UCS-2 characters can convert to:
If the resulting data is too long to fit the result field, the data will be truncated. If the result is single-byte character, it is the responsibility of the user to ensure that the result contains complete characters, and contains matched SO/SI pairs.
If you specify operation extender P for a move operation, the result field is padded from the right for MOVEL and MOVEA and from the left for MOVE. The pad characters are blank for character, double-byte blanks for graphic, UCS-2 blanks for UCS-2, 0 for numeric, and '0' for indicator. The padding takes place after the operation. If you use MOVE or MOVEL to move a field to an array, each element of the array will be padded. If you use these operations to move an array to an array and the result contains more elements than the factor 2 array, the same padding takes place but the extra elements are not affected. A MOVEA operation with an array name in the result field will pad the last element affected by the operation plus all subsequent elements.
When resulting indicators are specified for move operations, the result field determines which indicator is set on. If the result field is a character, graphic, or UCS-2 field, only the resulting indicator in positions 75 and 76 can be specified. This indicator is set on if the result field is all blanks. When the result field is numeric, all three resulting indicator positions may be used. These indicators are set on as follows: