On Fri, 2 Jan 2026 18:56:13 +0000, Farley, Peter wrote: >Currently Enterprise COBOL allows PIC X alphanumeric EBCDIC group and >elementary items to MOVE to UTF-8 (PIC U) and NATIONAL (PIC N) group and >elementary items with automatic character set translation, but the reverse >MOVE is not allowed. �There is no technical reason why the reverse MOVE should >not be allowed, since the character set translation logic is already in place >for a PIC X MOVE into PIC U and PIC N. > ... Is this relevant: <https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cobol-zos/6.5.0?topic=cobol-converting-from-utf-8-unicode-representation> You can explicitly convert UTF-16 data to UTF-8 data and UTF-8 data to alphanumeric data by using the DISPLAY-OF intrinsic function. You can also explicitly convert UTF-8 data to UTF-16 data by using the NATIONAL-OF intrinsic function. When using the DISPLAY-O F intrinsic function to convert UTF-16 to UTF-8, you must specify an output code page of 1208.
"alphanumeric" sounds restrictive. What about special characters? >I have a bit more detail on the subject in the "idea" summary, please read >those details at the "ideas" page and vote for it. > >https://ideas.ibm.com/ideas/COBOLVUE-I-427 > >TIA for your votes. -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
