NATIONAL phrase

Syntax rules

1. An elementary item which contains a USAGE NATIONAL clause or is subordinated to a group item with a USAGE NATIONAL clause must describe a national item with its PICTURE character-string.

2. The GROUP-USAGE clause may not be used together with the NATIONAL phrase.

General rules

1. The NATIONAL phrase specifies that the data item is to be stored in UTF-16 data format; that is, each character position is represented by 2 bytes.

   All national characters are of the same length for COBOL. "Surrogate Pairs" are therefore regarded as 2 characters.

Example 7-31

Data formats for USAGE IS NATIONAL

Data category	Value	PICTURE description	Internal representation*)
national	ABC	NNN	00	41	00	42	00	43

^*) Each box represents 1 byte.