The Windows runtime terminal manager includes built-in Unicode support. For all screen input and output, the data is dynamically
converted from the system code page, using UTF-16 encoding. COBOL_CHARACTER_SET enables you to override this, and can take
one of the following values:
- ANSI
-
Note: This is only applicable to Windows platforms.
- All data in the COBOL program is encoded in the current ANSI code page character set. This is the default, and is the equivalent
of setting the variable to 0.
- ASCII
-
Note: This is only applicable to UNIX or Linux platforms.
- All data in the COBOL program is ASCII. This is the default, and is the equivalent of setting the variable to 0.
- OEM
-
Note: This is only applicable to Windows platforms.
All data in the COBOL program is encoded in the OEM (DOS) character set. This is the equivalent of setting the variable to
1.
- <code page identifier>
-
Note: This is only applicable to Windows platforms.
- All data in the COBOL program is encoded using the character set relating to the code page identifier number. For example,
COBOL_CHARACTER_SET=437 would use the OEM United States code page for conversions.
Visit the following web page for a list of supported code pages:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd317756(v=vs.85).aspx
- UTF-8
- All data in the COBOL program is encoded using the Unicode (UTF-8 format) code page. This is the equivalent of setting
<code page identifier> to 65001 (Windows only).
Note: As this is a multi-byte character set, you may need to expand some of your data variables to account for the larger size.
- ISO-8859-1
-
Note: This is only applicable to UNIX or Linux platforms.
- All data in the COBOL program is encoded using the ISO-8859-1 code page.
You can use this variable to dynamically change the specified character set if your data uses a mixture of formats; for example,
data read from an XML file might be in UTF-8 format, while the rest of the data in your program might be in ANSI format.