The Parse Service Routine normally translates positional operands to uppercase unless the calling routine specifies ASIS in the IKJPOSIT or IKJIDENT macro instructions. The first character of a value operand, the type-character, is always translated to uppercase, however. Parse translates the string that follows the type character to uppercase unless ASIS is coded in the describing macro instructions.

When you specify ASIS on the IKJPOSIT or IKJIDENT macro instruction, syntax checking is done only on the characters, and will not ensure that the operands are actually valid. That is, if the data set name specified in the DSNAME operand is in lowercase, parse will return a return code of zero, although lowercase data set names are usually invalid. If this type of validity check needs to be performed, the user can create a validity checking routine and specify it on the VALIDCK= operand on IKJPOSIT or IKJIDENT macros.

Double-byte character set strings are an exception to this rule. Regardless of whether you specify ASIS, parse does not translate the contents of the double-byte character set string to upper case.