The NATIONAL-OF Function
The type of the function is national.
General Format
Arguments
- Argument-1 must be of class alphabetic or class alphnumeric. If alphanumeric, it may contain alphanumeric characters or national characters in external format, or both.
-
Argument-2 must be of category national and must be one character in length. Argument-2 specifies a national substitution
character for use in conversion of alphanumeric characters for which there is no corresponding national character.
Must be an integer. Argument-2 identifies the source code page for the conversion. Full support for a CCSID value other than
1208 (UTF-8) requires the installation of the appropriate IBM CCSID conversion table; see
Installing CCSID Tables for more information. The table name required for a CCSID of
nnn is
IBM-nnn. For example, to support a CCSID value of 37, you should install table IBM-37. If the required table is not installed, the
conversion is carried out using the default EBCDIC or ASCII code page (according to whether the given CCSID is EBCDIC or not).
Returned Values
- A character string is returned with each alphanumeric character and each national character in argument-1 converted to its corresponding national internal format. Any control functions used for external format representation in argument-1 are recognised only for purposes of distinguishing characters, and are not be considered as separate characters of argument-1.
-
If argument-2 is specified, each character in argument-1 that has no corresponding internal national representation is converted
to the substitution character specified by argument-2.
-
. If argument-2 is unspecified, each character that has no corresponding internal national representation is converted to a
national space.
- The length of the returned value is the number of character positions of usage national required to hold the converted argument and depends on the number of characters contained in argument-1.