National data

A national character is described in the PICTURE clause by the symbol ’N’. This specifies the number of characters, i.e. not the number of occupied bytes. A national character occupies 2 bytes and, in data structures, is aligned on the byte boundary.

Reference modification is also permitted for national data. In this case the characters also count for the start position and the length.

Example 12-11

01 nat    PIC N(30).

defines a data item for 30 characters in UTF-16 representation, i.e. 60 bytes

nat(3:6)

selects the 3rd to 6th characters of nat, i.e. bytes 5 through 12