Character Data Type

The character data type represents character values and may have any of the following formats:

A: Character, also referred to as "alphanumeric"
N: Indicator
G: Graphic
C: UCS-2

Character data may contain one or more single-byte or double-byte characters, depending on the format specified. Character, graphic, and UCS-2 fields can also have either a fixed or variable-length format. The following table summarizes the different character data-type formats.

Character Data Type	Number of Bytes	CCSID
Character	One or more single-byte characters that are fixed or variable in length	See CCSID of data in character format for information on the CCSID of data in character format.
Indicator	One single-byte character that is fixed in length	See CCSID of data in indicator format for information on the CCSID of indicator data.
Graphic	One or more double-byte characters that are fixed or variable in length	65535 (*HEX) or a CCSID with the EBCDIC double-byte encoding scheme (x'1200').
UCS-2	One or more double-byte characters that are fixed or variable in length	13488 or a CCSID with the UCS-2 encoding scheme (X'7200') such as 1200 (*UTF16).

For information on the CCSIDs of character data, see Conversion between Character, Graphic and UCS-2 Data.