1.1 Characters

The most basic and indivisible unit of the COBOL language is the character. The IBM COBOL character set includes the letters of the alphabet, digits, and special characters. The complete set of characters that form the IBM COBOL character set is shown in Table 1.

The basic IBM COBOL language is restricted to the character set shown in Table 1, but the content of nonnumeric literals, comment lines, comment entries, and data can include any of the characters from the character set of the computer.

X In some cases, the basic character set is extended with the national
X character set. The national character set support includes the
X Double-Byte Character Set (DBCS) and, additionally for AIX, the Extended
X Unix** Code (EUC) code page.

X Double-byte characters, as the name implies, occupy two adjacent bytes to
X represent 1 character. A character string containing DBCS characters is
X called a DBCS character-string.

X >_AIX_> For AIX, characters from the EUC code page can be from one to four
X bytes long. <_AIX_<

X DBCS and EUC characters are valid characters in certain COBOL
X character-strings. For details, see "COBOL Words with Multi-Byte
X Characters" in topic 1.1.1.2 and "DBCS Literals" in topic 1.1.4.3.

Individual characters are joined to form character-strings, separators, and text words.

A character-string is a character or a sequence of contiguous characters that forms a COBOL word, a literal, a PICTURE character-string, or a comment-entry. A character-string is delimited by separators.

A separator is a string of one or two contiguous characters used to delimit character strings. Separators are described in detail under "Separators" in topic 1.1.5.

A text word is a character or a sequence of contiguous characters between character positions 8 and 72 inclusive on a line in a COBOL library, source program, or in pseudo-text. For more information on pseudo-text, see "Pseudo-Text" in topic 1.3.5.6.

Character	Meaning

Table 1. Characters--Meanings
º + - * / = $ , ; . " ( ) > < : X ' A-Z a-z 0-9	Space Plus sign Minus sign or Hyphen Asterisk Slant, Solidus, Stroke, or Slash Equal sign Currency sign Comma Semicolon Decimal point or Period Quotation mark Left parenthesis Right parenthesis Greater than Less than Colon X Apostrophe Alphabet (uppercase) Alphabet (lowercase) Numeric characters

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1.1 Characters

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