Any combination of characters, either in character or hexadecimal form, can be assigned by the user as the value for a job variable. This information must not exceed a length of 256 characters (bytes). It is possible to address the entire length of the job variable or, if only a certain part of the job variable is needed, to address this part by specifying subareas. A subarea of the job variable is defined by specifying the position of the first character and the length of the subarea.
In commands, the job variable values are specified in the same format as character and hexadecimal constants in Assembler language, e.g. C'ABC' or X'C1C2C3'.
Hexadecimal constants of uneven length are padded on the right with a binary zero.
Note
When character constants are entered, a distinction is made between uppercase and lowercase letters.
This should be noted particularly when using conditional expressions in job control (see "Conditional expressions ") and when entering parts of commands from job variables (see "Input from job variables ").