The NATIONAL-OF
function returns a national character string consisting of the national
character representation of the characters in argument-1.
The
type of the function is national.

Format
>>-FUNCTION NATIONAL-OF--(--argument-1--+------------+--)------><
'-argument-2-'
- argument-1
- Must be of class alphabetic, alphanumeric, or DBCS. argument-1 specifies
the source string for the conversion.
- argument-2
- Must
be an integer or of class alphanumeric. argument-2 identifies
the source code page for the conversion.
If argument-2 is
of class alphanumeric, it must identify a primary or alias code-page
name that is supported by ICU conversion libraries (see International Components for Unicode: Converter
Explorer).
If argument-2 is an integer,
the integer must be a valid CCSID number.
If argument-2 is
omitted, the source code page is determined as follows:
- If argument-1 is a native item (USAGE DISPLAY
or USAGE DISPLAY-1 containing ASCII or ASCII DBCS,
EUC, or UTF-8 data), the source code page is determined from
the runtime locale.
- If argument-1 is a USAGE DISPLAY or USAGE DISPLAY-1
item containing EBCDIC or EBCDIC DBCS data, the source code page is
determined from the EBCDIC_CODEPAGE environment variable, if it is
set. If the EBCDIC_CODEPAGE environment variable is not set, the source
code page is the default code page specified in the
Locales and code
pages that are supported
in the
COBOL for AIX Programming Guide.
The
returned value is a national character string consisting of the characters
of argument-1 converted to national character representation.
When a source character cannot be converted to a national character,
the source character is converted to a substitution character. The
substitution character is:
- X'001A' if converting a single-byte character
- X'FFFD' if converting a multi-byte character
No exception condition is raised.
The length of the
returned value depends on the content of argument-1 and
the characteristics of the source code page.
Usage
notes:
- Use of code page names provides consistency with other AIX software, but
the source code is not portable to Enterprise COBOL for z/OS.
- The CCSID for UTF-8 is 1208.
- The CCSID for UTF-16LE is 1200.
Exception: If the conversion fails, a severe runtime
error occurs.