In a source program, you can use the characters that are represented in a supported code page in COBOL names, literals, and comments. At run time, you can use the characters that are represented in a supported code page in data items described with USAGE DISPLAY, USAGE DISPLAY-1, or USAGE NATIONAL.
The code page that is in effect for a particular data item depends on the following aspects:
For USAGE NATIONAL data items, the code page is always UTF-16 in big-endian format.
For USAGE DISPLAY data items, COBOL for AIX chooses between ASCII, UTF-8, EUC, and EBCDIC code pages as follows:
COBOL determines the appropriate code page as follows:
related tasks
Using environment variables to specify a locale
related references
Locales and code pages that are supported
Runtime environment variables
CHAR
COBOL words with single-byte characters
(COBOL for AIX Language Reference)
User-defined words with multibyte characters
(COBOL for AIX Language Reference)