In addition to the standard EBCDIC encoding of characters and strings, ASCII encoding of characters and strings is also supported:
The C/C++ compiler offers an option by means of which characters and strings can be generated in ASCII format (see "Generating ASCII characters and strings by means of a compiler option").
For every library function in the C runtime system that works with characters or strings or that returns a character or a string, there is a variant for processing ASCII characters and strings and a macro define that maps the EBCDIC variant of the function to the associated ASCII variant (see "Controlling the mapping of original functions to the associated ASCII variants").
For each compiler option you can activate all the ASCII functionality: the C/C++ compiler then generates characters and strings in ASCII format in all modules and automatically provides the appropriate ASCII functions for processing the ASCII characters and strings.
In addition, you can use the ASCII functionality provided in a modified form:
You can use the
_ASCII_SOURCEpreprocessor define to specify whether the library functions for EBCDIC representation are mapped to the associated ASCII variants (see "Controlling the mapping of original functions to the associated ASCII variants").You can use conversion functions to convert ASCII characters and strings explicitly from EBCDIC format to ASCII format (see "Explicitly switching between EBCDIC and ASCII encoding").