CCSIDs of Characters and Character Strings

Every character or character string has a CCSID associated with it. The CCSID of the character or character string depends on the origin of the data. You need to pay attention to the CCSID of a character or character string. It is also important that values are converted to the appropriate CCSID when required.

If LOCALETYPE(*LOCALEUTF) is not specified on the compilation command, the following assumptions are made:

• The CCSID of the job is the same as the CCSID of the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale.
• The CCSID of character literal values matches the CCSID of the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale.
• The CCSID of the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale is an EBCDIC CCSID.
• The CCSID that is used has all of the invariant characters in the proper positions, and some functions assume that certain variant characters have the same hexadecimal value as they would in CCSID 37.

When LOCALETYPE(*LOCALEUTF) is specified, most functions (unless otherwise specified) expect character data input in the CCSID of the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale, regardless of the source of the character data. See Unicode Support for more information.

For more information about variant and invariant characters, see Runtime Character Set. For more information about CCSIDs, code pages, and other globalization concepts, see the i5/OS globalization topic.